


Family Heirlooms

by Crownofpins



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Cults, Frottage, M/M, Turk-centric, Turkfic, also some stuff blowing up, elena is an urbanite, elena is thundr-infamous, gratuitous use of linen, hippies are doin' it for themselves, idk - Freeform, just basically emotions are hard, men dealing poorly with emotions, women dealing poorly with emotions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-07-18 09:10:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7308790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crownofpins/pseuds/Crownofpins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reno, Tseng, and a rapidly-radicalizing back-the-the-Planet commune in Sector Four. Investigative casework at its best; humans dealing with emotions at their worst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Air, Sass, and Salt

It was four in the afternoon, Reno was 65 floors up in the air, and the air conditioning was broken.

“Fuck me,” he hissed, slamming into the bathroom with a fury usually reserved for surprising targets getting blow jobs. “Come the fuck on, what the fuck, this fucking company owns the goddamned _planet_ and we can’t-“ he grunted and shoved the perpetually-out-of-order stall door open with a shoulder, “-even-“ hoisted himself up on the toilet and lifted up the slotted-in drop ceiling tiles, then boosted himself up, “-fucking-“ shimmied along through cobwebs and wiring and dead rats along the office ceiling, growling like a military dog on a bath day, “make sure our _shit_ works!” He had to shimmy extra-hard by a pair of vibrating ducts and it make him so mad that he just jerked himself through, heedless of the sound of fabric ripping. It served Tseng right for making him wear the goddamned thing anyway.

He pulled out the roll of canvas holding tools from under his shirt and set to work on the unit he had located by the company blueprints. ‘All very custom, so don’t get lost,’ Reeve had mentioned when he handed them over, ‘though why not go through the ducts?’ Reno had told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had seen some shit, but had no desire to see the number of people shitting he would if he went that route.

“Planet fucking _wept_ they couldn’t make this harder to get to, the fuckers!” Reno grunted in discomfort when the broken air circulation unit for their floor shocked him along the arm. It was strong enough of a shock that it made his leg spasm and bang against the abrasive roof tiles he was precariously balancing on. The mastered lightning materia slotted into his belt buckle prevented him from becoming yet another fried rat, but it sure didn’t tickle, he’d say that.

“Why should we when we have such capable handymen?” Tseng’s voice emanated from below him, ghost-like. Reno sighed, fighting off the pain of a shoulder cramping as he wrenched out the blown component he was looking for, and struggled not to sass Tseng back. Bad idea, especially lately. Reno’d been running on too short of a fuse as of late, to the point where Rude, ever even-keeled, had peeled his sunglasses down last night to look reprimandingly at him over them.

Reno had overstepped the line before with Tseng and gotten his ass handed to him for it. He respected the guy, mostly, but they’d always had unique ways of getting under each others’ skins. He didn’t need that right now, couldn’t take it, couldn’t dish it out safely.

Reno collapsed against the floor for a second, breathing heavier than he’d like to be. Fishing down his pant leg to find the replacement part he convinced the science department intern to make for him on their weird experimental printer (‘3D printer?’ he said, sneering a little, “what a shitty name, who even thought of that’), he drew it up and looked it over.

He felt mean these days, like a dog starved. He’d been trying not to bite anybody, trying not to take a limb in teeth and _tear_ , but he’d been trying awful hard as of late. Felt like it was harder every day.

“Somebody has to, boss. Can’t sit around waiting for you pansies to handle it.” He heard Tseng snort and felt a mingled curl of relief and apprehension when nothing more was said.

Rubbing his sweat off the part on his shirt, Reno slotted it in, secured it, and waited for a contented moment while the machine thought about it. Soon enough, the LED panel on the side displayed an error code (‘NONSTANDARD PART’ his ass, he wasn’t waiting for Tseng to approve the weekly order and get a real part for five times the cost). Perhaps concerned by the ominous, and obnoxious, beeping sounding through his office, the scrape of Tseng’s chair on the tiles could be heard.

“… Everything all right up there?”

Reno, in the process of using his phone to jailbreak the air circulation unit, made an extremely cranky noise.

“Just fucking fine up here, a million fucking degrees and rising but yeah, it’s fu- it’s fine.”

He was honestly starting to feel like he was melting. His hair was plastered to his scalp, his jacket soaked through with sweat all the way from front to back, and the fucking update was only 35% loaded in.

“Reno,” Tseng said, and Reno clenched his jaw, fixing his eyes on the app like it was going to magically blast Ice on him any second. “The reason I ask is….”

“Boss I _don’t fucking care right now!_ I’m sweating like a pig and I just finished the Gabrankytev sweep at dawn and I _just want to chill for a second!_ ”

The silence was deafening.

Reno squirmed, feels himself blushing. It was a bad giveaway, but he was a redhead and some things just couldn’t be helped. He was seven feet above Tseng and technically in another room anyway, so he just embraced it for a moment. It eased some of the pressure in him.

“I understand that, Reno,” Tseng said after another beat, and Reno almost wanted to melt through the tiles and become one with the building at how _gentle_ he sounded. It made him uncomfortable, made him relieved, made him wish he’d never even started this fool errand. He should have just gone to the bodega and bought like five million moogle pops and eaten every. Single. One.

He’d have felt steadier if Tseng had just told him to meet him in the gym in an hour, don’t forget the Cure this time.

Tseng seemed to be content to wait while Reno worked, for now. The app took another few moments and then he was in, and the air unit was turning on, and he was just _so- fucking-_

“Ow! Oh shit, ow!”

“Reno,” Tseng said, this time right next to him, and then a tile was opening and Tseng was poking his head up, dark eyes glinting oddly in the half-light, “come down.”

Reno held up a hand against the sudden stream of _broiling hot air_ , eyes watering, and nodded. He rolled sideways and slithered through the tile Tseng had pushed aside, and even though the air hadn’t really started cooling yet, it felt so much cooler down on the tile floor that it was all he could do to keep from lying down and never getting up again.

“Heat waste,” said Reno, and shut his eyes. He was lying spread-eagle on Tseng’s floor and he felt disgusting. His back was really, really wet.

“Yes,” Tseng said, considering ceiling the tile he had lifted up before slotting it carefully back into place. He wasn’t short, but neither were Shinra ceilings, so he was standing on his chair. For some reason, Tseng had historically been so opposed to rolling office chairs that it bordered on the dogmatic. Reno found it in himself to wonder if it was actually a contingency plan for if he ever needed to climb up into the ceiling himself. “That, and I think you cut yourself in the ceiling.”

“Huh?” Reno’s eyes flew open. There was a small, but very red, stain on the ceiling tiles. In Tseng’s stark, monochrome office, it stood out like a green chocobo. Tseng hopped down, put his chair in place, and started to rummage in his desk, emerging with an old-fashioned metal first aid box that had some chips in the paint.

Reno sat up and felt himself over. He found the gash on his ribs, explored it a little and then stopped abruptly because it sure did go _in_ a bit. “Oh. Shit. Sorry.”

“Take off your jacket and shirt,” Tseng said absently, pulling out a bottle of what looked like medic-grade Potion and a few other things, “and come sit on the desk. I’ll patch you up.”

Reno turned his head and looked at the door. “I can just go down to medical,” he said, and started to gather himself up.

Tseng tapped the desk with a nail wordlessly, still not looking up from his box. Reno stood, conflicted, and looked at the spot on Tseng’s immense, pristine desk that was being readied for him. He wished, when things like this happened, that he could just be like Elena, could hop up on that desk like it was his favorite thing, and just bask in the attention, bask in the fact that for whatever reason he’d been forgiven for totally flipping his shit like a rabid Nibel wolf.

“I want to ask you something anyway,” Tseng said coolly, as if he hadn’t noticed that Reno was looking for excuses to stay and to bolt.

“Sure thing, boss.” He slunk over, shedding his jacket and his shirt like he was just walking to the shower. Tseng wrinkled his nose at the pile of clothing left on his floor but didn’t comment on it. Tseng tapped the desk again. Reno hopped up, feeling very much like he was at the doctor’s but without the weird crinkly paper.

At that moment, Tseng was close enough that Reno could see that he was sweating too. He could smell the scent of his body, warm and animal but somehow _so sophisticated_ , just like everything else about Tseng. The very top button of his shirt was undone, a rare concession to heat that Reno couldn’t really look away from.

“Here,” Tseng said, putting a hand on Reno’s shoulder and twisting him just so. “Lift up your arm, please.”

His dad’s a doctor, Reno remembered as Tseng started to clean up the smear of blood running down his side. His dad was a doctor and his mother died in a war-protest-turned-riot. She was Shinra MP. He knew this because Tseng told him once, when as a new recruit he called him some racial shit he really didn’t think he wanted to ever repeat again. Then Tseng beat him into the gym mat for a week straight, ten hours a day, and in retrospect Reno is pretty sure he deserved every inch of that truly epic beatdown and then some.

“Hold still,” Tseng said, as if Reno didn’t always freeze up near-instantly when it came to touching, medical or otherwise.

Silence again. The slightest hint of cooling air drifted in from the vents and Reno felt like he should be proud of himself; instead, he just felt stupid for getting sliced up and needing to be patched up.

“Did you go to medical after the bust this morning?” Tseng was putting something on that numbed the area, his hands nimble and professional. “I’m going to have to put in some stitches.”

“I didn’t need to,” Reno said, and blushed right up to his ears. “Until uh, the vents, that is.”

“I’ll give you a once-over while you’re here,” Tseng muttered, and when Reno turned his head to look at him and protest, he caught sight of his own flesh yawning open, pressed that way by Tseng’s fingers, and felt a little dizzy. “Save you on the paperwork.”

A whole lot of olive branches being extended here. Enough to make a whole fucking tree. Reno’s eyes tightened. Tseng caught that as he threaded the needle and looked him up and down.

“Not numb enough? I can put on another-“

“What’s up, boss? What do you want?” Reno looked at the top of Tseng’s head, and, tellingly, Tseng didn’t look back up at him. He could feel, distantly, the pull of the catgut through his flesh.

“A few stitches in,” Tseng said, “Probably five. Some paperwork from your work this morning. You’ve already fixed the air, so we’re clear on that.”

“Yeah?” Reno said, challenging, and for a second he wanted to reach out a put a hand on Tseng’s shoulder, over the confident motion of his stitching. He wanted to reach out and feel the steadiness there, feel it seep into him and maybe stay there, just for a little bit.

“Yeah,” Tseng retorted, teasing Reno by adopting his street-tough accent, tone and all, for a moment. Reno felt himself ease a little. He’d never been good at people being nice to him. He was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, or, more accurately, fling itself at his head. Teasing was just hostile enough that he could play at being ruffled, play at not feeling cared about.

Elena was good at that. She was tough, that bitch. Reno thought about her again, thought about her sitting in his place, her little heels hanging off the toes of her feet, her nylons running from having shimmied around in the ceiling. He thought about her for a moment longer, feeling fondness for how good she was at just letting people do whatever _at_ her, not letting it touch what _she_ was about to do. Didn’t bother her like it did him. She’d probably had more practice at letting shit slide, he thought, and sighed. He’d never tell her any of that.

The air was getting colder, and when Tseng slid his hands around Reno’s ribs gently to test his work and make sure nothing else was off there, goosebumps rose up his sides. Reno didn’t comment on the prickling wave sliding down his skin, looking out the window at the muggy haze of Midgar instead. It was hard to see the city in the dimming sun, but not because of the low light level. It was the haze of humidity, of pollution, of a million and more lives steaming up off the pavement and into the sky.

“What did you want to ask me, man?” Tseng guided his arm up on the non-injured side, testing mobility. He paused with Reno’s elbow in his palm and gave him a look. “Er, boss.”

“You grew up in Sector Four, didn’t you?”

He knew it. He just fucking knew it. He knew it was too good, too relaxing, to stay that way. There was always a drop after a high.

“I did,” Reno said, and breathed in when Tseng told him to, breathed out when he told him that too.

“Did you ever hear of the Gaea Commune?”

Reno said nothing.

“Reno?”

Reno said nothing.

“Reno?” Tseng stopped his inspection of Reno’s sizzled arm and looked him full in the eyes. He looked half-concerned, half-confused.

Reno wetted his lips. “Yeah,” he croaked out. “Why?”

Tseng hesitated, then went back to inspecting where Reno got shocked. He reached into his medical box and pulled out some gauze.

“You got less injuries busting into a warehouse with two dozen armed men. Maybe I should set us up a training course on urban exploration to improve that.”

“ _Tseng_.” Reno tried to jerk his arm out of Tseng’s grip. Tseng, an old hat to Reno’s resistance to being treated, simply hung on to his wrist and pulled him back in.

“They’ve been stirring up some anti-Shinra sentiment, that’s all. There have been some reports over the years of… strange situations there. The few people that have left have described it as more of a cult than anything. They’re apparently a prominent group in the area these days, convincing people Shinra’s going to kill them with vaccines and mysterious chemicals in the air.”

Reno sat in silence with that for a bit.

“Of course, they’re not entirely wrong about the latter.” Reno’s gaze flicked down to Tseng’s face, confused. Tseng gave him a quirk of a smile. He was bandaging up the raw spot on Reno’s arm, he was just asking him for information from the local perspective, he was just making a little joke to lighten the mood, but fuck it all, he had _no idea_ how local Reno’s perspective on this was. “The problem is, they’ve been attacking Shinra employees in the sector and there are rumors they’re planning something… larger.”

“They gonna’ try to blow up the reactor?” He supposed he wasn’t surprised.

Scratch that. He was actually surprised this hadn’t happened sooner.

“I…. hope not,” Tseng said, brows knitting. He straightened up. “You’re familiar with them?”

“Ha!” Reno said, and Tseng tilted his head like an inquisitive wolf that was just about done with sniffing around and was ready to put some _teeth_ on the matter.

“Do you have any contacts we might be able to tap? It seems like something is happening there that may be…. The situation has escalated rapidly in the past few weeks.”

“Well, Tseng, my man, you’re in luck.” Reno felt a little too filled up with things, and blustering like a gangster, a cool guy, a swag asshat who knew what was up and what was down, helped him to vent some of that pressure. Tseng, confused by the abrupt tonal shift, remained silent. “Because my mom is dying, and she sent me a message to come see her before she does.”

Tseng, always composed, always cool and together, gave Reno a look about as filled with different things as a Sector Four burrito special was: pity, concern, confusion, shock, worry, calculation. Over it all rose… sympathy.

“Reno, I… apologize. I had no idea.” He leaned in, handsome even with Reno’s blood under his fingertips and the orange smear of antiseptic pronounced on his index finger, handsome with sweat drying as the aggressive corporate air conditioning started to flood in. “I can ask somebody else to handle this. I’ll draft up your leave paperwork-“

Close with his dad, Reno realized, like a good Wutaian son, even here in Midgar. Close and raised right and raised well and a good, loved son.

“My mom,” he said, talking over Tseng, who was still too off-balance and busy being compassionate to look annoyed, “sent me a message to come see her at home before she dies. I haven’t been back there in fifteen years and my man,” he reached out and flicked Tseng’s lapel, unable to meet his eyes as the realization hit his boss, “she said to bring my ass down and a friend if I want because she is _dead real soon,_ and the _whole fucking family_ wants to see me there for her death and her burial.”

Tseng made a noise, but then Reno was curling over on himself and he couldn’t hear anything but his own heartbeat. Somebody was crying, making wrenching, animal keens, but Reno wasn’t sure who it was. He was too busy jamming his hands on his face to shut out light and sound and everything, everything hurt. Whoever it was making those awful noises, he wished they would shut up because he had a lot of stuff on his plate right now and he just couldn’t handle anything else right now.

His face was wet and his whole body ached and he just killed seven men today and broke a whole lot more’s bodies into pieces and he was so, so overloaded that he wished he could just- vanish into the sun, get eaten up like an asteroid and never be seen again-

In the middle of all of that, he felt arms around him, a pressure on his head. He jerked back like an animal hit, and in that action he realized that Tseng had wrapped his arms around him, was embracing him, was talking to him. He had his head over Reno’s, was resting his chin on the crown of his head, pressing Reno to his chest, to his throat. Reno couldn’t bring himself back enough to understand what he was saying, but it sounded comforting. It sounded kind.

It just made him cry harder.


	2. Stamps, Tea, and Greens

“I always just assumed you were an orphan,” Tseng said, handing Reno a cup of what he claimed was hot tea with something else, but was in actuality a bit heavy on the ‘something else.’

Reno took it and sipped at it, staring ahead like a dog fresh from the vet.

“I’m surprised nobody looked into it. I kind of just assumed everybody got the ol’ frisk and pat background check.”

“There wasn’t much to find for you.” Which was true, and in an older candidate would have warranted more looking instead of a blithe dismissal. But for a mouthy, arrogant seventeen-year-old gang banger a history as short and common as Reno’s hadn’t warranted a second look. Tseng made a mental note to… change that assumption. They had gotten lucky with Reno, but in their line of work, taking risks was supposed to be calculated, not accidental.

Reno continued his new and very unsettlingly un-Reno trend of saying nothing, of lapsing into dead silence. Rude had come to him earlier in the week about Reno’s increasingly erratic behavior, as had Elena, but Tseng had dismissed them both with the bland promise that he would look into it. He hadn’t, of course. To his mind then, Reno was as unknowable as a forest fire and twice as dangerous to control. He supposed it was his own vanity that had led him to dismiss Reno’s recent outbursts. It was comforting, in the scheme of things, to feel like you had a leash on lightning.

But Reno was a human being, not a genuine force of nature, and more than that he was one of Tseng’s human beings. The Turks had shrunk considerably since his own apprentice days. While they had always been tightly-knit, with only four main agents and a mere handful of reserve staff, the group had the questionable luxury of having almost no surprises waiting in the wings, no sudden quiver of nerves or tingle of conscience that hadn’t been aired out prior. It made for tight operations, for better or for worse.

Discovering that one of your agents had an unexpectedly intimate tie to a back-to-the-earth cult movement was not, in any definition of the term, _tight._ It meant that Reno had been keeping his mouth shut for over seven years, and before that nine more. It meant that Tseng had grown lazy, had slackened his own ties to his men (and woman). It made alarm sear through him, down his spine and then back up again.

What else had he missed?

“I left,” Reno spoke up suddenly. Tseng realized when he did that the silence had stretched on for quite a while. He was crouching in front of his subordinate still, and as he realized that he stood again. Reno, seated on Tseng’s black leather chaise, followed his movements like a sunflower tracking the sun. His change in position seemed to have silenced Reno once more.

Reno was not a vulnerable man, Tseng knew. His first explosive interaction with the man had firmed that opinion up tightly. He didn’t like to be touched, did like to booze, enjoyed flirting but very rarely took anybody to bed. He hadn’t had a single long-term partner in the entire span of time he’d worked with Shinra, and before that, though he’d been involved with Midgar First, he hadn’t formed any close ties with members of the Midgardite supremacy group.

Knowing that did nothing to wipe the hollowed-out look from Reno’s face. He looked small—was on the small side, at least compared to Rude or Tseng himself-- though his personality was so burning, so all-consuming, that it was often impossible to remember that.

Tseng had never seen Reno cry. They’d been working together, more or less, for seven years and not once had Tseng seen him weep.

Now, though… His eyes were still pink from crying, lashes wet, a flush still lingering on his face. He had a ring of teeth marks on his left wrist where he’d bitten himself to try to stop sobbing and then Tseng had dragged him off himself, and his hair was stuck to his neck like the down of a bird.

Reno was not a vulnerable man, but he sure looked vulnerable right now.

“Why?” Tseng finally asked, when Reno continued to look at him like he was begging him for something.

Reno opened his mouth to say, expression morphing into one he’d seen before countless times, though in situations that had mattered far less to him than now: confession.

But as he opened his mouth, something inside of him crumpled in under its own weight, folded down and compressed and crunched. Reno closed his mouth, blinked once, and in the span of that flick of lashes he pulled up his personality again behind his eyes like a stage curtain.

“Sometimes a man just has to see the world, right?” Tseng put a hand to his chin. Reno took another sip of his drink.

“By the math, you would have been about nine.”

“I’m an early bloomer.”

“I’m sure,” Tseng responded dryly, and Reno cracked his trademark sideways mostly-smile at him.

“Anyway….. I can handle it. I’ll bring you over to the land and we can take a real good look around.” Tseng had his doubts it would be that easy, but he couldn’t turn his nose up at such a prime connection to such an insular group.

“Perhaps you should bring Elena or Rude?” Tseng spoke without thinking. A lot of that today, for him, and he had a feeling he was going to be up late tonight thinking about that.

Reno’s internal curtain fell away for just a second, as if the stage hands behind his eyes had dropped a corner of the fabric. He looked cast adrift, and Tseng physically fought the urge to reach out to him again, even just to put a hand on his shoulder.

“I uh, I think I probably… might have pissed them off a bit lately.” An understatement.

Tseng understood, though, what he really meant, and tipped his head. He could feel the slide of his ponytail on the nape of his neck and mentally made a note to get a trim very soon.

“Since this is somewhat high-priority,” Reno, he was referring to Reno, but Reno heard him talking about the case, “I should probably go myself, anyway.”

“Okay,” responded Reno very simply, and for a moment he looked as pliant and trusting as a child.

 

 

 

Tseng offered to chat more, but Reno demurred, saying he had some errands to run.

“Stamps to buy, and you know how the fucking post office is these days. Their hours are goddamned impossible,” he said, sticking his hands in the pockets of his shredded, bloody jacket and fishing out his wallet.

“Stamps?” Tseng sounded very dubious, even to his own ears.

“No internet on the land, man. It’s all bird-mail.” Reno winked. Tseng blinked back at him. “No cell phones allowed either. No laptops or wifi.”

“I… wasn’t aware,” Tseng replied carefully.

“Aren’t you fucking lucky you have me, then!” Reno chirped, changing from a snarl to a coo mid-sentence, and swung to his feet, bounding towards the door. Tseng caught up to him in two strides, put a hand on the knob before Reno could reach for it, and opened his mouth, but Reno beat him to it.

He swung to face Tseng, pressing his hand at the seam of the door and the frame.

“Listen, uh….. boss.” He licked his lips, avoided Tseng’s gaze, then met it. “Can you do me a favor and not mention the…. Uh, you know.”

Tseng quirked an eyebrow.

“Just don’t mention the…… you know. Just….. the.” Reno looked like he was facing down a very angry, very sharp-beaked chocobo. “Please?”

“I’m going to have to brief Elena and Rude on our mission, Reno, including how we managed to make contact with the group. They’re going to wonder.”

Reno nodded briskly, then stared hard at the floor.

“Just don’t mention the. That I.”

Tseng couldn’t help himself. He reached out and clasped Reno’s forearm firmly, about as much warm contact as Reno usually ever allowed. Reno, for once, seemed to bow into that point of contact.

“Thanks, boss.”

And Tseng opened the door, and watched him strut out like a cock parading the hen house.

Nothing about the investigation thus far had led him to believe that this was going to be an enjoyable case, or an easy one. But even amongst all the unsettling details emerging, the fact that Reno was bound up in it all by simple fact of birth was the most discomfiting.

 

 

 

“Reno has been such a little cocksuck this whole week. I’m _glad_ you’re dragging his ass off somewhere.” Rude, used to Elena’s foul mouth when ruffled, sipped on his four-gil cup of tea and said nothing. Tseng, seated uncomfortably in an aggressively mint-colored plastic chair in the upscale tea store, just looked at her. “Sorry,” she added, in a tone that finished, _not sorry._

“He’s had his mind on other things,” Tseng started, staring at his own cup of tea with a curl of apprehension. He was never telling his father he went here. He’d probably get disowned. Mocked, at the very least.

“Uh yeah, I guess.” Elena gave Tseng a squinty look that still somehow looked pretty. Makeup? he thought distractedly, maneuvering the hot cup to his mouth with the least air intake possible. No fresh-brewed tea should smell so _sweet_. It smelled like cotton candy.

“I hate this tea,” Rude said apropos of nothing, which saved Tseng from taking a sip. Elena pursed her lips and sipped at her own cup. Tseng had paid; it was his turn to foot the briefing snacks but Elena’s turn to pick where to go. To his knowledge, though, Rude hadn’t even taken a sip yet either.

“Well I don’t care. Some of them suck but I know which ones are good and I only get those, and it’s not my fault you didn’t listen to my suggestions about what you might like.” Rude sighed and looked at his cup. The steam fogged up his sunglasses.

“His mother is dying,” Tseng said, raising the cup to his mouth again, “and she’s a member of the place I’ve been trying to crack for a month now. He’s my way in.”

Elena stared at him, blinking rapidly over her stainless-steel mug emblazoned with the logo of the shop. The rubber rim was the same shade as their chairs. Her lips, painted in a very trendy and current shade of red, formed a little pursed circle.

“Okay so now _I_ feel like a total asshole.”

Rude picked up his tea and drank some; Tseng, fluent in Rude-esian, understood that to be some form of penance for his earlier irritation with Reno. It might have been more straightforward to simply say as much, but that wasn’t Rude’s style.

“You’re kidding me, right? He grew up with those nutjobs?” Elena clacked her nails on the table. It was the same shade as their chairs, but glossy instead of matte. The difference in textures, for some reason, really irritated Tseng. “He can’t have- that doesn’t even make sense, he like…. For all sorts of reasons, that’s really weird.”

“Makes sense,” Rude chimed in, taking another sip of his tea. “Makes a lot of sense.”

Elena looked at him, skeptical, but seemed to be willing to acquiesce for now.

“I don’t think ‘grew up’ is quite the right term,” Tseng said, raising his voice to be heard a little over the gaggle of school-aged girls streaming in. They would have to fight their way through the swathe of middle-aged women clustered at the counter, sniffing (Tseng thought the next thought very rebelliously) fake teas. It was clearly a bloodbath in the making. “He left when he was fairly young.”

“’Left’ sounds pretty passive,” Elena pointed out, wrinkling her nose and avoiding the meaningful stares of some other women with their own paper cups of tea. As an aside, she muttered, “God lady, find your own seat, we were here first.”

Tseng couldn’t help but view Elena, in her natural habitat, with a great deal of pleasure. She was a Midgarite, born and bred, from a rather well-off family that hadn’t really expected her to do much more than get her Mrs. degree and settle down to breed the next generation of the family. Instead, she had taken the Shinra secretary job her father had gotten her and turned it into something else entirely. He still remembered her mother’s screamed demands that she have some of her eggs frozen with a measure of grim fondness.

Elena had a natural sense of what was hot in the city at any given time. Part of what made her an excellent Turk was the innate finger she had on the pulse of Midgar; she knew what was trendy up-plate and down, and more importantly for the job, she knew the best way to look tragically, horrifyingly uninteresting in any Sector and any side of the plate. She’d been in charge of disguise ops for a few months now, and she was already demonstrating a certain finesse that belied her experience.

So it was only natural that she was at home in one of the trendiest, hottest stores (this week) on the Upper Second Plate. She had grown up in the ranks of the women around her, and took great pleasure in forcing, finally, a hard division between them and herself. Separate but together, close but never touching: Elena’s life in a nutshell, until she joined the Turks.

It made Tseng think of Reno again, the ways that that concept applied to him as well.

“Boss?” Tseng coughed and refocused on his Turks. The shop was getting yet more crowded, which made talking freely easier at least.

“It’s the verb he used,” Tseng clarified, “and I wasn’t about to question him.”

“Oh yeah…. I think I just heard the end of that.” Tseng’s eyebrows shot up. Elena gave him a casual shrug in response.

“My office is sound-proof.”

“I bugged it,” she responded simply. “Rude said I needed to work on it so I built a tester and brought it in to the office.” Rude didn’t speak or move, either to support Elena or chastise her. Tseng couldn’t interpret that as anything other than beaming, joyous pride.

“I,” Tseng said, torn between irritation at her, irritation at himself for skipping his morning bug sweep today, and a niggle of pride of his own that she was practicing in her off hours, “How much did you hear?”

“Like I said, just the end.” She hadn’t been put on an investigation case of her own yet because she still had some pretty obvious tells she was working out. Elena had either miraculously worked out those issues in the hours since their last training meeting or was in fact telling the truth. “Early bloomer, just like Reno to say something that flip about something like that.”

Her face relaxed, briefly, into the blankness he knew on her as melancholy.

“I don’t know much about it,” Rude commented. “Fill me in?”

“It’s your normal bunch of dirty weird hippies,” Elena spoke up, leaving Tseng to consider drinking his ‘Rhubarb Sweet Day Moogle Donut’ tea. It had seemed like word salad, so he’d picked it out of morbid curiosity. “Complete with weird child abuse allegations, a really small amount of people who escaped and left the city never to be seen again, and a huuuuuuge set of contracts with a bunch of local academies.”

“Contracts?” Rude was from Costa Del Sol originally, and so had always seemed to find Midgar politics both incestuous and unsettlingly dispassionate in equal measure. His current apprehension was, in short, fairly routine.

“Yeah, I think my middle and high school kitchens bought their greens from them,” Elena confirmed. She was daintily stirring her tea and giving a gaggle of women a lazy, smug smile.  The women were pretending not to see her; she was pretending not to be smiling at anything in particular. “All-natural, no pesticides, whatever. They have a lot of land out on the edge of the sector. Somebody has to grow all our spirulina, right?”

“Spirulina comes from lakes,” Rude corrected. Elena smiled cheerily at him, unfazed.

“Anyway, they get some money coming in and veggies coming out. They have a big wall around the whole place, though. You can’t see in, it’s really weird. My dad and I would go by one side of the wall when we were driving out to the ocean property.”

“Creepy,” Rude agreed, and sipped at his cooled tea.

“It looked more like a jail wall, honestly. There was barbed wire and glass and stuff on top.”

“Extra-creepy,” Rude confirmed, and sipped again.

“Still hate it?” Elena asked, tone impish.

“The tea is fine now.”

Tseng took a sip of his own.

“I don’t like it,” he said. Elena opened her mouth to speak after giving an exasperated sigh, but he elaborated, “Reno being tied up in all this.”

“It’s not exactly going to be a dispassionate investigation, is it?” Elena fiddled with her cup, her rivals across the room forgotten. They seemed to have moved on as well, browsing a wall filled entirely with brightly-colored tea canisters. “What, is he going to have to bury his mom and then shoot his uncle? I know we do some….” Glancing around, she continued, “stuff, but even for us, that’s a little…”

“It’s the only in we have.” Tseng turned his cup around in his hands.

“Sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself,” Rude commented, finishing his own cup with a handsome tip of his chin that exposed the bob of his Adam’s apple. Several women in the shop were watching him as he did it. Rude clearly knew it too; he touched his bottom lip as if wiping away some faint trace of liquid and the women all swooned.

“I am,” Tseng agreed.

“I just hope it doesn’t come to that,” Elena said. “Maybe he can talk some sense into them, I don’t know.”

Tseng thought of Reno shuddering in his hold, thought of his tear-wet lashes, thought of his keening, of how it was so painful to watch it had made his own breastbone ache in sympathy.

“I don’t see that happening.”

“Maybe it’s better that way,” Elena said. “Catharsis or whatever.” Rude looked at her in surprise, uncertain of what to make of that, but Tseng understood. Or, after today, he sure hoped he did. “Anyway, we should go back. Tammy Janison just came in and that girl doesn’t _get_ boundaries. She’s going to feel your shoulders up if you let her, Rude. I won’t judge if you’re into that, though.”

Rude scanned the crowd, located who had just entered, and shook his head.

Tseng stood, watching Elena fake a thrilled greeting with a woman who looked like she could be her sister, picked up his cup, and drained it in a few quick swallows. He’d expected it to be sweet, given the name. Maybe it was how long he’d let it sit, or maybe it was just junk tea.

Whatever the reason, it went down bitter.


	3. Recycling, Fish, and a Digestif

It was five and still hot as Ifrit’s nutsack when Reno heard a knock at his door. He shut off the water, standing at the sink for a moment in silence while he listened. His gun was still strapped to his side, his electro-mag on the kitchen table.

The silence stretched, allowing the ambient noise of the city around him to seep in. Birds on the lines, people groaning in the heat on their way to somewhere else. The occasional sound of a car going by, and, distantly, some sirens coming closer.

Finally the knock came again, coupled with, “Let me in.”

Reno gave an irritated half-smile and pulled a dishtowel into his hands, starting to dry his dishes.

“The door is open, man, just come in.”

“I wish you’d lock it,” Tseng grumbled, shouldering his way in. The door didn’t latch, and only stayed shut with any reliability when deadbolted- yet one more ‘charming’ feature of a set in a building grown old and soft around the edges. “Anybody could just walk in.”

“I do have a lot of recycling right now,” Reno assented, smile going from fake-curly to real-flat as he peeked around the wall to watch Tseng toe off his shoes. “Did Rude ever tell you about the time we all fell asleep drunk and woke up to some bum standing over us, taking the beer cans out of our hands?”

Tseng flashed him a horrified look from behind the two large paper grocery story bags he was clutching, paused in the act of stepping out of his left shoe.

“Rude and I just stared at him, we were so fucking scared. Elena grunted, rolled over and went back to sleep- said later she assumed it was the cleaning guy. I asked her why the fuck she assumed I had a cleaning service and she said it was ‘cause he wasn’t jerking off on any of us.”

Carefully peeling off his second shoe, Tseng looked dubiously at Reno’s overflowing recycling bin and vowed to take it out tonight when he left.

“Anyway, that man was a saint. He even washed the dishes and took out the trash. My redeemable cans were a small price to pay for a visit from such a benevolent being.” Reno tucked the dish he’d been drying under his arm long enough to clap and bow before retreating back into the kitchen.

Padding into the kitchen, Tseng put his grocery bags down and shook his head. “That story is a literal example of why you _should_ lock your door. He could have killed you all. Honestly, sometimes it’s like you’re not even an adult, let alone a Turk.”

“I guess,” came Reno’s voice from inside the bags. “But it’s better than taking everything too seriously, like _some_ people. Anyway, ‘Lena and Rude were there too. What’s this?” He emerged holding a paper-wrapped package, which he brandished at Tseng like his mag-rod.

“ _Fish,_ ” Tseng snatched the packet out of his hands. “Lock your door. That’s an order.”

Reno whistled by way of response and bonelessly flopped into one of his mismatched wooden chairs.

“What’s this all for, boss? You cooking me dinner? Taking me on a date? Tears get you hard?”

Frozen in the act of seizing Reno’s one kitchen knife from the magnetic strip Rude had installed for him, Tseng was torn between casting Reno a look of horror or just beating his ass.

He choose instead to ignore him, rummaging around for a cutting board. Reno cackled to himself, stood up, and maneuvered open his old fridge. The hinges creaked as he pulled out two beers. “Want one?”

“You’ve already pulled two out,” Tseng replied levelly, carefully extricating a dented stainless steel bowl from under a series of equally-dubious pots. “Why do you have so many things in your kitchen? You don’t even cook.”

“I inherited it,” Reno shrugged, holding out the newly-opened bottle to Tseng. He took it, understanding it as the peace offering it was, and leaned against Reno’s tragically-out-of-date counter with an inexplicable metal rim. Reno settled next to him, looking over the grocery bags with open curiosity. “I moved into this old place with it furnished.”

“Why?” Tseng had only been over a handful of times, preferring to meet his Turks in bars or other public locations. He knew they all socialized fairly frequently amongst themselves, but he mostly kept to himself barring a few important occasions. He understood the importance of subordinates being able to blow of steam with peers, especially in a job like theirs. “Do you have any outstanding debts I don’t know about?” The address was mere blocks away from an actually good part of town—in fact, only twenty minutes from his own home. It was hard to tell from inside the building, though. Reno kept it clean (surprisingly), but there were signs of dilapidation everywhere that no amount of cleaning could hide.

“Haha,” Reno muttered around the mouth of his beer bottle. “No, I don’t know, I just… I don’t mind it.” They gazed at the falling-down kitchen together for a moment. Tseng saw the puddle of water slowly marching to the middle of the room from under the fridge, the countless holes in the walls from previous tenants’ unevenly hung pictures, the dingy and variously cracked windows that only let in shards of light and no real full view of the street. He snuck a look at Reno, saw him looking at the tiny, battered kitchen table, and got the distinct impression that Reno was seeing something very different.

“Haven’t you lived here since you started at Shina?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Reno mumbled, turning away to start washing dishes again. Tseng found himself facing the nape of Reno’s neck, the arc of his shoulders as he washed. He watched Reno’s hands nimbly thumbing through a gaggle of chopsticks at the bottom of the rusting sink for a second too long, then jerked himself away. “It wasn’t always such a wreck. Or,” he lifted his head and looked around, “maybe it was, I dunno’, and I just didn’t notice.”

“Must be cheap,” Tseng offered. He took a drink.

“Super cheap,” Reno agreed, grinning again.

“I figured I’d cook you dinner and you could brief me about the commune.” There was a beat of silence as Reno continued to wash, a faint clink sounding as he rifled through the dishes.

“Sure,” he said.

“Then we can come up with some kind of cover story,” Tseng continued, finding himself watching the nape of Reno’s neck again. “Because we certainly can’t go in saying we work for Shinra.”

“Hah,” Reno replied, scrubbing determinedly at a plate with what looked like cheese caked on. “Shows what you know. That’s the best thing to do for those guys.”

Tseng raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Sure. Shinra, the Planet…. It’s not an argument for those guys. It’s just a fact. Like… a religion. They’ll break their backs trying to convert us, might even toss in some juicy details without meaning to.”

“If you’re sure,” Tseng said.

“Mostly,” Reno assented, tacitly acknowledging that they would, as always, have to play by ear when it came down to it. “I mean, I haven’t been there in ages. So, who knows. Maybe they’ve gone all AVALANCHE on us.”

Another silence fell. Reno turned on the water, turned it off without rinsing anything. He picked up his beer again and drained it in one go, then started picking at the label.

Tseng had always found Reno’s choice in beers interesting- he’d never really brought it up, but he had a strong suspicion that Reno picked them almost entirely based on their labels. This one had a suspiciously cute one featuring pink and yellow and rounded Bombs, an unusual aesthetic choice for a brew with such a high alcohol content.

“So, what do you want to know?” Reno rummaged in the fridge and came out with another beer, this one’s label featuring a fluffy, fat chocobo. Tseng worked very hard to keep his expression neutral upon seeing that.

“What should I know?” He put his beer aside and started back to work on dinner, minding the stream from the fridge as he crossed the room to continue unpacking. “Can you put the fish back in the fridge for now?”

“Sure,” Reno said, “gimmie a sec. I should actually rinse this stuff first.”

“I can do it, then,” Tseng said, turning back to the counter.

“I’ll do it, just give me a sec.” Reno turned and stepped forward at the same time that Tseng arrived at the counter, bringing them into a sort of physical impasse. They both froze, Tseng almost touching the small of Reno’s back with his left hand, Reno’s left hand under Tseng’s right on the package of fish. “Uh,” Reno said, at the same time Tseng started, “Eh.”

“I thought Turks weren’t supposed to get into awkward-ass positions like this,” Reno groused, fluidly sliding out from under Tseng’s arm like a Honeybee from a John who hadn’t paid his last bill but was chatting her up about a future session.

“If only it were that easy, Sephiroth wouldn’t have regular meetings with HR.” Tseng scooped up the fish and went over to the fridge. “He’s due for another on Monday.”

That startled a laugh out of Reno. It seemed to ease the tension somewhat, or maybe his second beer was starting to hit him, because he shook his head and tutted, grinning easily.

“Poor bastard. What’d he do now?”

“He told a cadet that mako didn’t increase penis size, and that it was usually better to focus on technique anyway.”

“Oh my _Planet,_ ” Reno cackled, breaking down into his normal effusive laughter.

“Then,” said Tseng, starting to chop.

Reno howled, “HE WASN’T _DONE?!”_

“He said that he strongly recommended making use of a more experienced partner,”

“What the fuck,” Reno breathed through his laughter.

“Because as with any physical skill, repetition”

“NO”

“-breeds-“

“OH”

“ _accomplishment._ ” Reno was laughing into his beer, rendered boneless, flushed pink on the tops of his ears. Tseng drank in the sight, relishing the fact that even as somber as he usually was, he could still get a good laugh when he tried.

Reno took another sip of his drink, laughing more quietly now, and looked at the grocery bag still sitting on his table. “Fuck me,” Reno breathed, wiping his eyes and standing up. “How on earth did that poor bastard manage to grow up like that?” He started rooting around, pulling out some vegetables and making a dissatisfied face at them.

“The cadet already went to see HR,” Tseng added, dumping the cabbage in a bowl with some seasonings to soak.

“Oh yeah? How come?” Making a satisfied noise, Reno emerged from the bag holding a plastic container of baklava. “I love these things. They’re so weird and dry and you think they’re gonna’ suck, but then at the end of the bite they’re like, ‘just kidding, I’m the best thing you ever had!’”

Tseng refrained from mentioning that Rude had told him what to get for dessert.

“Because then the cadet looked at Angeal and Genesis who were practicing in the next yard over and said that it explained a lot. Don’t open those, they’re for after dinner.”

“Aw,” but Reno did put the little box, closed, down on the table. “Man, what the fuck, is Genesis still chasing cadet ass?”

“Seems like it,” Tseng confirmed.

“I can’t really imagine nailing a sixteen-year-old,” Reno mused, folding up the grocery bags and tucking them in a squeaking drawer. Tseng wasn’t sure if it just needed waxing or if mice lived in there.

“Probably for the best,” replied Tseng, and tried not to imagine nailing a twenty-six-year-old.

“Can I just smell it?” Tseng looked over his shoulder at Reno, frowning. “Just a little sniff.”

“No. Help me here.”

“Aw,” Reno said again, but did as requested.

 

 

 

 

They didn’t talk about much of anything important until the end of dinner. Reno was happily licking his fingers clean of honey remnants, seated on the hideous old couch in the living room. Tseng found the thing unnervingly squishy, but he reminded himself that Elena had spent the night here before. Besides (he’d had a few beers by this point, each label growing progressively cuter), it was reasonably comfortable.

“We weren’t allowed to eat normal shit like moogle puff pops or chocofluff sandwiches, so my mom would give me honey as a treat,” Reno said, inspecting his hands for cleanliness in the dying light sliding through the filthy windows.

The place was, Tseng had to admit, spacious. The old wooden floors, though dangerously splintery in some spots, were beautiful broad planks. The exposed beams of the ceiling weren’t perfectly clean, but Tseng had to admit that he’d always found wood grain soothing, even under a fine patina of dust. Some new fixtures, new appliances, new windows, and a good cleaning, and it’d be just as fine a house as any.

“It’s weird there. They started homeschooling us after I got a busted lip in the neighborhood school. Never learned any chemistry or history or shit- it was all like, poultices and old gods and, you know.” Reno gestured with his hands. “We worked in the fields with the adults, didn’t get a lot of rules. We could do what we wanted.”

“Sounds pretty….” Tseng frowned and sipped at the digestif he’d poured for both of them. He’d been about to say, ‘nice,’ but he’d never heard of children running away from no school and very few rules.

“Life is different there,” Reno said, and unthinkingly stretched out so his knee touched Tseng’s. He was wearing baseball shorts and a tank top, which Tseng rather envied. He’d come over in his suit, so he was still stuck in slacks even though he’d taken off his dress shirt to cook, leaving him in a tanktop of his own. Reno didn’t have air conditioning; even if he had, Tseng rather cynically felt it probably wouldn’t have worked very well. “There’s a council that makes decisions, usually old folks. What to plant, who to sell to, how to allocate funds.”

“Why’d you leave?”

Reno huffed and hunkered down further, legs spreading, his knee rubbing at Tseng’s as he slumped down until his legs hit his coffee table, a battered old trunk with severe water damage.

“I was scared.”

Tseng turned to look at Reno. Reno was looking out his dust-caked window like he could see Junon from where he sat. Dying sun filled the room with that particular shade of red that only appeared on a hot summer dusk.

“It’s a pretty live-and-let-live place. Peaceful. Honestly, it’s not as crazy as some of the rumors bear it out to be.” Reno scratched his chin and huffed. “I mean, actually, I don’t know, it might be for adults. In retrospect, some of that stuff was pretty weird when I think back about it. But for us, it wasn’t like, you know, a raging Ifrit cult or anything nuts like that. No child sacrifice.”

“Hm.”

“But like….” Reno’s hands fluttered once, then again. “Mom…. She wasn’t in very good standing with everybody else all the time. She was… pretty arrogant, and I think she liked acting the martyr kind of?”

“You paid for her mistakes?” It wasn’t the first time Tseng had heard of that dynamic.

“Er, kind of? Like, some adults would turn a blind eye if I was getting beaten on by other kids, but that’s not too bad.” Tseng eyeballed Reno, refraining from commenting. He had always wondered where those scars came from, and he had always suspected something like that as their source. “No, I mean, basically, my mom would smack me around a little, but she…. I was.”

He drank his digestif in one go, like a shot, then looked at the little glass in surprise. “Sweet.”

“It’s supposed to be.”

“I was afraid she was gonna’ kill me, or something. Not by beating, just…. Or convince me to kill myself. Or something insane like that. I was really afraid of her. Lots of people were. She was always really hard to read.” Reno’s throat worked. “She was always really smart. I guess I’m not explaining real well…. Okay, for example, she got into mysticism and convinced me to let her mark me up with a special materia brand, supposed to up my affinity to fire. She always spun it like it was something really cool and fun, and like you were just a complete waste if you didn’t go with it.”

Tseng tried to process that, tried to imagine his father taking a brand to him.

“I mean, I was all for it, it sounds cool, right? I was that kind of kid. But then it was happening, and it just… hurt, so much. And I was scared but she still made me do it, both sides, long presses each. Amos patched me up and yelled at my mom, but she was… like, really, the marks,” Reno touched them and Tseng realized with dim horror that he couldn’t look away, “weren’t the thing that made me run away. She like, spun it in a way that made it so that I felt bad for going to him. He didn’t give an inch, but she told everybody that he was a Shinra spy and that he’d been at it for a while, trying to undermine the mission.”

“The… mission?” Tseng’s ears pricked up even over his own slowly rising tide of revulsion.

“Yeah, you know, paying tribute to the earth goddess, growing natural shit, no mako, lifeblood of the Planet, so on. Not really as interesting as it sounds, sorry man.”

“Mmm,” Tseng agreed.

“So,” Reno shifted, took his hands away from his face. Tseng still couldn’t peel his eyes off of the marks, long and perfect and red, and no different than the day he met Reno almost a decade ago. Likely no different than they’d been when Reno was a…. a literal child. “Amos was run off. Like, my mom wasn’t the only person there who was a little….. And I was all alone. Or, I had my mom, but I…. she got really mad at me when we got home and wouldn’t talk to me. She didn’t talk to me for four days and I guess I…. just sort of figured it was my fault, Amos being gone. So I left.”

“Did you get lost?” Tseng frowned, puzzled.

“No, I had gone on deliveries with people before. I found Amos but he was at a train platform to go to Junon and then on, and he wanted me to come with him.” Reno sighed then, heavy and soft and low all at once. “I think about it a lot, you know? If I had gone with him. I’d… probably have ended up real different.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Tseng, and thought of Reno with the shaved head and eyebrows and pierced lip he’d had when he was brought in, the violent Midgar First riots of that mad summer, the way he’d broken his hand beating Reno into the mat for calling Tseng everything he’d learned from the group. He stretched, subtly rubbing his leg against Reno’s knee, and looked at the lean stretch of that bare leg against his own.

“I went back, right? Of course I did. I was like…” Reno gestured sloppily with the same hands he’d been fluttering around. “Not very tall.”

“You never have been.” Tseng couldn’t resist rubbing it in.

“Shut up,” Reno grumbled. “I went back but they wouldn’t let me in. Said my mom said Amos had gotten to me. About the Shinra stuff. And there’s a big huge wall to protect against monsters and Shinra and robbers, so that was that.”

Tseng had another vivid flash of a memory, of Reno tied down to a bed in medical, writhing and cussing and resisting even when Veld offered him jail or a job.

“Your mother didn’t take you back?”

“Nah,” Reno said it so casually Tseng almost thought he’d misheard him. “I went back every day for a month. Then I went back every other day. Then I’d gotten down to like…. Once a week. And my mom was waiting for me one day.”

“To let you back in?” Reno scoffed and cozied up to Tseng, pressing against his whole side. He was sweaty and drunk and beautiful in the light. Tseng tore his eyes back down to where their legs were touching rather than look at Reno’s bright eyes, illuminated from the side like church glass.

“She was there to laugh at me. She called me an idiot and said I had probably been planning on leaving her for a while, and she wasn’t going to give me the satisfaction of begging to have me come back.” Tseng whistled. “So I left. And I… bounced around, for a while. Had a rough time. You know where things started to look up for me.”

Reno lying slack and unconscious on the gym mat, bleeding from his mouth, bleeding from the corner of his eye, bruised everywhere. Tseng standing over him, hand stabbing pain into his brain, satisfaction stabbing relief into his heart.

_Things started to look up._

“So that’s…. that.”

“Everybody went with it,” Tseng concluded, a single point in a sea of conclusions that sparkled sharp and deadly as nails.

“Yeah, everybody was chill with it. That’s it. Collective work, collective agreement.”

Silence laid down on them like the weight of a corpse. Reno was… relaxed, more so than he had been the other day. Tseng… He closed his eyes, working through Reno’s timeline with the sudden additions in place. Thought of his own childhood, thought of plenty of other stories he’d heard in his time as a Turk. He thought about Elena, and he thought about Rude, and he thought, briefly, about Rufus. He thought about his father.

“Anyway, it’s not like I was getting the shit beaten out of me on the regular, you know, or like, playing naked pony with a fifty-year-old neighbor. So. That’s me. That’s the commune.”

“Reno,” said Tseng, and didn’t know what else to say. He felt a prickle in his eyes and told himself it was the sun, almost fully set now, the light around them sliding into pink-green-violet.

“Tseng,” Reno said, turning his head to grin at him. Tseng turned his head too, to look back at Reno. He must have been… abruptly, he felt much drunker than he’d realized he was. Reno wetted his lips to talk and Tseng watched him, feeling like he couldn’t possibly look away. “Tseng.”

“Yes?”

“Crying doesn’t really get you hard, does it, man?”

Tseng’s expression snapped into sharp, startled disgust.

“ _No._ ”

Reno curled up like a snake on retreat from striking and loudly cackled his way to the kitchen, feet beating a loud rhythm. “Grab your fancy pen out and get ready, boss, because we’re gonna’ have the most fucking epic strategy session your ass has seen this side of solstice!” Tseng, feeling a little dazed, stared in the direction of the kitchen. “You want another beer?” The cheery _chnk-Sss!_ of a bottle opening followed.

“I’m switching to water,” Tseng said, and ran his hands through his hair desperately.

“You’re so responsible,” Reno said, and rummaging sounds could be heard.

“I’m trying,” Tseng muttered, then, louder, “Solstice was last week!”

“Yeah, well.” Reno appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, stretched out narrow and lean, holding Tseng’s water in one hand and his beer in the other, arms above his head, lashes low against the last of the sun. Tseng tried very hard not to stare at the fine line of fire-red hair that had appeared at the top of his shorts when he stretched. Reno was too drunk to notice, but Tseng sure wasn’t. “Nobody ever accused me of false advertising.”

 _Precisely the problem_ , thought Tseng, and clicked his pen menacingly at the paper Reno had produced from nowhere and was now spreading over his coffee table. _Precisely the problem._


	4. Custard, Wutaian, and Mail

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick note about timelines: this is set somewhere before Crisis Core and the main game. Certain aspects of canon outside of the main game are accepted and used, while some are discarded or ignored (Elena’s origins, for example). Some of this is stylistic; some of this is because aspects of the compilation make no fucking sense. I guess this technically makes this an AU?
> 
> Warning for somewhat graphic depictions of violence and vague references to sex in this chapter. It’s the Turks, so hopefully nobody is too taken aback.
> 
> A special thank you to Licoriceallsorts, who I sincerely hope actually likes licorice, the superior chewy candy. Your kind words encouraged me a great deal!

 

 

* * *

 

 

Elena’s mouth was a thin line when Reno handed her a helmet. They were standing in the parking garage under HQ on the first level, where stark, burning sun leaked in in slatted stripes. They were in the shade, but Elena was looking out over the visible rooftops stretched out below Shinra, looking at the splatters of green roof gardens and dollops of black water tanks. They were standing next to their departmental parking spots, Reno squinting at her like a cat anticipating getting sprayed with water and not caring.

“You know I hate riding in the city.”

“Just because the cops know you by name, baby. You probably have more tickets pending than I do.” She quirked an eyebrow. Reno grinned and shrugged. “Okay, maybe more?”

“My dad always gets me off,” she said airily in that way she knew Reno hated.

“You should talk to a psychiatrist about that, bud, that’s out of my depth.”

“Oh, _my, GOD_ -“ Elena’s voice rose with each word, crackling with rage on the last.

 

 

 

When Tseng came down to the garage later that day, he found a blood splatter next to the beater car they use for under-Plate pickups. He spent a good minute staring at it before he decided it was probably Reno’s. The new dent in the fender confirmed it- there were a few fluorescent hairs caught in the seam of the metal from where it got patched the last time it got shot up. There was a tacky drip of blood next to the hair, too, cooking slowly into the metal in the shimmering sun.

Tseng paced around it a little more, looking the thing over, before snatching the hairs out but leaving the sticky drop of blood. Looked better that way, he decided, sliding into the driver’s seat and starting the car. It roared to life unwillingly, giving a faint whine as it settled into an idle. Tseng gave the dirty dashboard a light pat.

Elena was getting even better at her disguise ops. He’d have to commend her.

 

 

 

“Didn’t have to do me that hard, ‘Lena.” Reno had been a big baby the whole day and Elena was about ready to strangle him. Lovingly.

“You asked for it, Reno. And you know I’m _all_ about giving people what they want.” He smiled at her sweetly and fondly when she said that. Caught in the flood of some unnamable emotion very close to horror, Elena shoved his gil aside and handed the counter girl her card.

“Hey, I said I’d pay.” He licked at his iced custard mildly, eyebrow quirking up. Elena found herself thinking back to her daily ‘liar lessons’ with Tseng before sliding back further, to her step-mother (number one) giving her an open look of pity when she caught Elena (age eight) trying on her mother’s wedding dress. “I can pay.”

“I wanted to,” she said, flicking her hair and neatly writing in a tip to the cashier girl before taking her own custard and walking out onto the street, leaving Reno to snag her card.

“Well,” Reno slunk up to her side, and if Elena focused she could feel his fingers deftly sliding her card back into her pocket, but only barely, “I guess you gotta’ give yourself what you want now and then too.”

They licked at their cones in silence while waiting for the walk signal to switch from a puffing bomb. When light flickered they started to cross, blending in with all the other lunchtime salaryfolk flooding the streets. Elena eyed some jewelry thoughtfully, made a face at a pair of shoes, and contemplated tackling a man wearing a tie she _needed_ for Rude. She settled for snapping a picture with her phone from a distance and sending it out to her college clique’s group chat. One of them would know the designer, probably personally. Planet knows they had more time to waste than her these days.

They’d been walking in silence for a long while by the time she noticed it. Elena sighed softly, curled her lip thoughtfully, looked over at Reno from the corner of her eye. Cautiously.

He was focused on his custard entirely, cracking the cone in a methodical, calculated manner that seemed at odds with how he presented himself. Lies, Elena, knew: Reno was as tactical and ordered as Tseng, but in an entirely different way.

A store door jingled open behind them, sending a wash of cool air conditioning to touch their ankles like a desperate ghost. “Is your head okay?” She asked, finally, and hastily looked down to her own cone to make sure the custard wasn’t melting all over her hand.

“It’s fine, ‘Lena. You healed it up just fine.” Reno gave her a sideways look, like a dog who’d been kicked while eating handfed treats one time too many. He shifted the parcel they’d gotten in his hands. The plain brown paper crinkled a little. They started down a small side street, Reno sliding into his usual slouch.

“I can’t give you a brain aneurysm the week before your big joint mission with Tseng,” Elena said by way of explanation. It sounded like a bad lie to her ears, and clearly Reno felt the same, because he snorted and cracked the tip of his cone between his teeth. The dog had gotten the bone, seemed like.

“He say it was gonna’ be a week before? I don’t know about that. Still haven’t gotten a letter back.”

“What, a letter like a _letter_ letter?” Elena had to wonder what Reno’s handwriting was like. She assumed bad, but she’d made a lot of stupid assumptions about Reno that he’d been more than happy to break for her. Usually in the most humiliating way possible.

“Yeah,” Reno groused, and for a second she thought it was about it being a real honest-to-Planet paper letter with ink and glue, but nope: “Honestly, ‘Lena, I kind of thought you of all people wouldn’t get weird about it being a physical letter. Your family puts out all kinds of letters.”

“Those are for parties, though.” Elena nibbled on the end of her cone, turning left into an even smaller alley. “They’re literally just to show off. And they get them done by the printers.”

Reno gave her a doubtful look, his eyes cat-slit narrow again. “Hang on, I’ve seen those things, they’ve got fucking _signatures_ in there.”

“They print those too, Reno!” Elena turned on her heel and slammed the point of her cone into the eye socket of the man who had been creeping up on her. He screamed, clawing at her, but she grabbed at his throat and pulled the gun at his side out of its holster, shooting him in the thigh, then the chest. Reno was dealing with another person, a mountain of a guy with a huge puff of hair resembling a cactus. He slapped the guy across the face with his still-charging mag-rod, jammed it into the staggering man’s throat, and fought the man’s spasms in order to keep the rod in place. The guy started to steam, foam erupting from his mouth.

“One, roof!” Elena turned her gaze upwards, saw somebody aiming for her, and fired the taken gun. “Nice one,” Reno said as the main on the roof slumped down, half his head missing.

“Ifrit,” Elena looked down at the stolen gun. “I’m keeping this thing. It has some real fucking punch.” Its owner, lying in a rapidly-growing pool of his own blood, watched them with terrified, wide eyes. Well-- Elena corrected herself-- a terrified, wide _eye_.

Reno removed his mag-rod from his would-be assasin, pulling out his own gun to shoot the guy once between the eyes. “You wanna’ question your guy or call it closed?”

“Please,” he choked out, reaching up a shaking hand to her pantsuit. “Please, I gotta’- I got a family, my wife, she’s gonna’…”

He was crying, shaking, dying. Elena gestured to the package Reno was carrying.

“Was it about that?” The man nodded as much as he could.

“Damn dude, you should be counting your lucky stars. She could have shot you a whole bunch a’other places.” Reno leered at the guy. He looked too terrified for the leer to take effect, which dampened Reno’s mood a little.

“Tell your boss we have it. That’s the end of it.” Elena felt powerful like this, which was, she supposed, the normal response to literally having somebody’s life in your hands. “If you cross us again, you’re going to find yourself missing a few more eyes.” She didn’t even care that she was going to have to use the special Shinra dry cleaner to clean up all this blood from her suit. Not right now, anyway.

“Uh,” said Reno, holding up two fingers and folding down one. “He’s only got one, baby.”

Elena cast a dismissive Cure on the man, just enough to prevent his immediate, looming death, tucked her new gun away, and walked over to where the body on the roof was dangling. She started climbing up on a trash can to reach it.

“He said he had a wife, didn’t he?”

Reno whistled in response. The guy on the ground started sobbing.

 

 

 

“Mission successful,” Elena said with a cool sternness, at the same time Reno tossed the now-grubby package onto Rude’s desk. It had taken some time to dispose of the bodies- couldn’t just leave those for cops or MPs to find, it was bad form. Reno had soothed Elena’s raging temper a little by promising to get Tseng to approve the dry cleaning as a business expense.

“Hm,” Rude said, peeling open the side of the package to look in. “Robotics parts?”

“Some kind of old project developed by Gast, I guess.” Reno sat down on Rude’s desk. Elena shuffled in place, warring with herself. Rude lifted the flap of the package towards her, and she tried not to look too eager as she leaned in to peer into the darkness.

“Is that a… metal spine?” She fished it out with two fingers, gingerly, and dangled it in front of her like it was raw meat. Reno took the package and started peeling out other parts. They all looked reasonably familiar. Rude made an appreciative face, which consisted of a smooth eyebrow raise and then an equally smooth eyebrow lowering. “It’s pretty small. Long though.”

“Looks like. Cat sized?” They all looked down at the parts for a moment, puzzled silence filling the air. Rude reached out and arranged the parts on his desk in a configuration that did, indeed, look like some kind of robot cat skeleton, albeit one that seemed to be missing an important majority of its parts.

“I sure hope it was worth murdering two people,” Elena said, and wondered what on earth she’d been thinking with that cone maneuver. It made her shimmy a little inside in discomfort. Her father had told her she was making a life-altering choice, joining the Turks, that it was going to take her and chew up what was inside and leave her something else entirely, like an intact shell over pulped meat. Something bloody wearing his daughter’s skin, he’d said, and Elena remembered mocking him about that, asking if he was planning on a larger-scale body-snatcher invasion any time soon. Mostly, she agreed with him, though she wasn’t about to admit it. Her feelings on it were just… considerably more positive.

This morning, the way she’d half-blinded a man and killed another without even thinking, was…. Maybe not one of those times? She didn’t know. She had made a choice, anyway, and she couldn’t change it now. Nobody left the Turks because they felt a little wiggly inside from a morning of murder and torture. Or, more accurately: nobody left alive.

She supposed she should have felt afraid, knowing that she was in deep. Instead, all she felt was a sense of comfort. She was entangled, but that entanglement came with closeness, with a sense of camaraderie. A sense, in a particular manner, of intimacy, whether she liked it or not. She liked it.

“Eh,” Reno said. “They’d have killed us. Speaking of which, _damn_ , that wife threat was _so smooth_.” Elena smiled lightly in response, felt bad about it, didn’t. “He’s going to be pissing on his own leg for _years_ about that one. Fuck, I might even be!”

“Wife threat?” Rude chimed in, already pulling a foam-lined box from one of his desk drawers. He must have been prepared. Reno started enthusiastically relaying their ‘dramatic battle,’ leaving Elena to look at the parts once more. Her phone buzzed, and she realized the girls must have figured out the tie.

Turning her attention elsewhere, Elena wandered off, leaving Reno to regale Rude with their exploits as loudly and with as much embellishment as he could. She flicked her phone into her small breast pocket, planning to examine what her girls had brought her.

She flicked a glance back in the doorway, taking a mental snapshot as she went: Rude flexing his eyebrows with appropriate awe as each new development in the story came to light. His hands, beautiful and long-fingered, at odds with his fighting style, delicately placing each component in the foam-lined box just so. The tip of an immaculately shined shoe visible from under his desk, just under the dark wood.

Reno, frozen in a laugh, teeth bared, eyes bright, hands reaching out wildly as if to strangle a monster in front of him. His ponytail slinking around his shoulder, under his lapel and out again like a snake made of molten glass. His body turned to Rude, his shoes scuffed, his jacket askew, his dress shirt unbuttoned, his tie missing. A shot of light against his chest, lined up like a sniper laser. His eyes tracking Elena, a subtle flick of green that nobody else notices.

 

 

 

He looked sad, Elena thought as she pulled the door shut. But, maybe he always had, and she’d just never put the word to it before.

Maybe they were all sad.

Her phone buzzed again, and she flicked her fingers to it. Tseng nodded to Elena, approaching down the hall from his office. Almost guiltily, she flicked her fingers away from her breast pocket.

“Elena,” he said, and she felt the little swoop in her stomach that she sincerely hoped he would never, ever know about. She might have needed lessons on how to convince people of facts, but lying about how she _felt_ was different. She’d been lying to men about her feelings since long before she could put words to the why of it.

“Sir,” she replied cheerily, “Mission accomplished. Rude is boxing up the parts now.”

Tseng nodded at her gracefully, touching her elbow unthinkingly as he slid by her to go into the main room his Turks all shared as an office-cum-den. He did things like that, touching elbows to go around, bracing shoulders to pass behind. Reno said it was to make people think he always announced his movements. Rude said he’d probably worked in a kitchen in college.

“I presumed,” he said, pausing in the doorway, and Elena felt painfully, horrifyingly pleased by how good his assumption of success felt. “Heading out, I take it?”

“Yes, sir. Unless there’s anything else today…?” She smiled, felt pious even as she hoped, very sincerely, that the answer was no. Tseng was devastatingly handsome and a powerful presence and upsettingly attractive to her in ways she didn’t always enjoy.

Right now she didn’t give a Zolom’s ass. She wanted wine and a shower and to send for a disturbingly large amount of Wutaian food that would prompt her usual place to send up two sets of chopsticks instead of one. Her frankly mundane daddy issues could be unpacked another day, probably with Reno over some new bitter ale from Gongaga.

“No need,” he said, flicking his head in a quick shake.

“Sir,” Elena said, gratefully, and stepped away to gather her things, to gather her mind, before she descended back into the mess of people getting off work in Midgar below the tower.

Forget two sets of chopsticks. She was going to aim for _three._

 

 

“ ’Lo?”

“Hey ‘Lena,” said Reno into her ear, and Elena stared fixedly at the ceiling.

“Are you drunk?”

“No,” Reno said, drunkenly.

“Why are you calling me?”

“Wanna’ come over and watch the version of Loveless where everybody is a naked dude?” Elena was actually somewhat tempted. Her Thundr date, picked like a doll from a catalog, peeked up at her from between her legs. He was cute, with big blue eyes and floppy blonde bangs. He looked nothing like anybody she worked with, which was the main draw if she was honest.

“I’m a little busy right now.” Her date gave her what he probably thought was a devilish grin and went back to work on her. He’d been trying to give her oral, but it felt more like he was rummaging through a sale bin of old records.

“Not too busy to open the phone,” Creaked Reno into her ear, and she snorted.

“Open? What the fuck, do you think I have a flip phone?”

“Who is that?” groused her date, pulling away from his bargain basement motions.

“Coworker,” Elena said, and when he gave her a slanty, irritated look at odds with his squeaky-clean aesthetic, she added, “a friend.”

“He wanna come over too?” Reno mumbled, a sound not at odds with his normally somewhat-disheveled aesthetic.

“No,” said Elena, pushing the guy’s head away from her crotch. “We’re done here.”

“Hey, wait,” said her date, at the same time Elena said, “I fed you, you owe me.”

“Damn, ‘Lena,” Reno purred into her ear. “Normally that’s his line.”

“I know. That’s why I buy dinner.”

 

 

 

Another triple order of Wutaian later (Southern style this time, all burning spice and brined seafood), Reno was pillowed on Elena’s shoulder, being lulled to sleep by Poppy Stop seducing the Prince of the Western Ice. Elena had seen a lot of versions of Loveless, but this one was probably her favorite. It wasn’t just because it was hilarious, or because it was hot. It wasn’t even because it was Reno’s only copy, though that helped.

She remembered the first night she got the news that she’d been accepted into the Turks as a trainee. Reno and Rude had dragged her out to go bar hopping, catching her in the middle of a phone call with her father. Considering they’d been having a screaming match, the interruption had been… well, initially, okay, unwelcome. Reno had snatched her phone away and hung up on her father, and Rude had wrapped a big, solid arm around her shoulder and steered her out of the parking lot.

‘You’re a Turk now, Elena. Like, okay, a baby Turk, but a Turk.’ Rude had agreed with a nod while Reno made a weird, tongue-sticking-out snarl at her. ‘Daddy’s got no jurisdiction here.’

So they went out, and they got. Drunk? No. Hammered? Not really. Completely, totally, utterly destroyed?

No, none of that. They went out and Reno and Rude taught her how to drink without drinking. Lesson number one, they said, and Elena found herself so wrapped up in it that she didn’t even realize she’d forgotten about anything until it was 3am and she was beating the shit out of some guy who had tried to roofie Reno. Lesson number two, Rude had said, and Reno slunk out of an alley splattered in blood with suspicious silence dogging at his heels.

By the time they got around to collapsing on Reno’s weird squashy couch that night, Elena had climbed up to lesson fifteen. They had all piled up together, showering one by one, and then they settled on that weird-ass couch and watched a porno with a plot. Elena, still shivering with the latent shock of what they’d gotten up to that night, was put between Rude and Reno. They’d fallen asleep that way, rolled into work together the next day, left work that day bickering about where to go for dinner.

Elena combed her hand through Reno’s hair. He stirred, looked at her bleary-eyed. There were a lot of empty beer bottles lined up on his kitchen counter, and only a few of them were from Elena’s efforts.

“Tseng told us about your mom.”

“Hn,” he said, and though he didn’t move, she could tell he was instantly, immediately awake.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

Reno was silent. Elena struggled to stay silent herself. Lesson number fifty-three: let the other person talk first.

“… Felt shitty,” he finally admitted, turning so that his lips were millimeters from her neck. She could feel the heat, the wet of his breath. “With your mom, and with Rude.”

Rude had a lot of extended family, but no father, no mother. She’d killed herself, that was all Elena knew. It was all Reno knew, or so he said, but even that was almost too much to know. Elena’s father was on stepmother seven and her mother and father were locked in an eternal legal battle over their various finances. Elena saw her mother sometimes. She saw some of her various stepmothers more and had a better time when she did.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Elena said to him. He stayed silent, but she felt his arms slide up slowly, like he was nervous on their squashy couch with their favorite porno with a plot, filled up with takeout and half-asleep on her shoulder. He locked his arms around her waist and tucked his face into the hollow of her neck. Everything was slow, slow, like he’d been hit with a weak status and was trying to work through it. She held still.

“Nothing makes sense,” Reno said to the soft skin of her neck. He was whispering.

“Reno,” Elena said, petting him some more. “Nothing has to make sense. Some things are just fucking shitty.”

He chuckled once into her hair, then again. The laugh grew inside of him until he was sliding to the floor, boneless, belly heaving with rocking, sobbing laughter.

“Goddamn, ‘Lena.” She prodded him with a foot, making a face like he was dog shit. He grinned at her, all teeth and relief. “Teach me some of your fucking lessons, girl.”

“I can’t,” she said soberly, and hastened on when his expression slid back into seriousness for a second, “your hair is just plain the wrong shade for your complexion, and I can’t move on until we fix _that_ big fucking mess.” He gave her a warm, satiated look. “Let’s call Rude over and start the movie over. There’s still a shitton of food here.”

“Okay,” Reno said, and promptly fell asleep on the floor.

 

 

 

Reno sat up with a little snuffle. Elena had put a pillow under his head and a blanket over him sometime in the night, which was nice of her. He’d gotten all weird on her last night, too much to drink and not enough water, and she’d put a blanket over his ass. What a girl.

He picked up a random carton from the edge of his coffee table and started eating without checking what was inside. His eyes roved around the apartment, taking stock.

Elena was asleep on the couch, hair messy but pretty that way. She hadn’t cleaned her makeup off before she went to sleep, so it was a little smeary. She’d probably bitch when she woke up, but he couldn’t bring himself to mind. He was used to her steady low-grade irritation, found it comforting at certain points. She was the kind of woman he always figured he’d look at from a distance but never touch, if he was honest, but here she was, up close and personal. She was tidy and well-put-together, always-on and bleedingly wealthy and a big fucking contradiction. He felt bad for her dates most of the time, though usually for a different reason each time. Wasn’t too easy to measure up to the complete ideal of Tseng, he figured.

Chewing thoughtfully on a water mandrake sliver from his mystery container, Reno stood and wandered over to look down at the street. The postman was out, meandering from building to building, the red pom-pom on his hat bobbling as he shoved rolls of paper into increasingly smaller mail slots. Poor bastard was probably delivering a ratio of something like a million sale flyers to one personal letter. Chomping contentedly on a shrimp, Reno reflected on the futility of delivering things nobody wanted, sent from people who didn’t care if they got there. There was something in the futility of it that cheered him, and he watched the mailman do his rounds with a renewed level of interest.

The mailman stopped in front of his building, looked up, looked down, and started to rummage in his mail bag. Reno sighed, realizing he was going to have to actually recycle the flyers instead of chucking them into the trash like he normally did. If Elena saw him trash paper she would never let him forget it. Sometimes her being a pain in the ass was _actually_ a pain in the ass. Rude usually just grabbed the papers and recycled them himself when he was here, fixing Reno with a stern stare that he could feel even through his sunglasses. If he-

“Hey,” Reno said, forgetting that it was so early it was still velvet-dark, forgetting that Elena was a light sleeper, forgetting that he was eating seafood that had been sitting at room temperature for hours and hours. “Hey!”

Elena stirred on the couch, snarling, but Reno was already out the door, sprinting down the stairs, flight after flight until he was bursting out the front door, heedless of how loud he was. The mailman didn’t even bat an eye at a disheveled dude in tiny boxers bursting out of an old, sketchy-ass apartment building. He was clearly an old hand at delivering mail in Midgar.

“Letter for the top floor,” the guy said, and resolutely shoved a brown-paper envelope into Reno’s mailbox slot.

Unbelievable. Un-be-fucking-lievable. He had to go back up and get his mailbox key.

“Couldn’t you have just handed it to me?” Reno shouted after him, frustrated.

“Nope,” said the guy, his pom-pom bobbling away.

“Fuck you too,” Reno called back with no heat, and the mailman flicked him a double-bird without looking back, already walking up the steps of the next building.

Reno stomped up the stairs, this time not caring who heard him for an entirely different reason, and snatched the mailbox key from its hook. Elena glared death at him as she gummed at a leftover egg roll, her hair sticking up in back like she was thinking about trying out for SOLDIER.

“Shut up,” one of his neighbors shouted on the third floor, and Reno kicked the door as he went by hard enough that it bounced open. He heard somebody run to pull the door shut, then start a low, terse scold. He caught the word ‘Turk’ and smiled to himself as he slid down the bannister. It wasn’t a nice smile, not by anybody else’s standards and not by his.

The way his hands shook took him by surprise as he opened his box. The letter sat there, the corners of the envelope fluffy from being handled. Home-made paper, he guessed. He remembered making it, if he strained himself. Drawing it out of his mailbox like it was a mastered materia, Reno gave a full-body shudder, then another one, and another. He couldn’t look at the thing. He couldn’t read it, couldn’t even look at the address to see if it was his mom’s handwriting or somebody else’s.

He shut his box, padded back up to his apartment, and called Tseng.

“Reno,” he said, sounding sleepy, his voice pitched low and intimate. Reno flung the letter at Elena like it was a water balloon. She caught it and squinted, confused, at the return address. “What’s wrong?”

Reno abruptly realized he didn’t know if Tseng had a partner, if he had somebody lying in bed next to him. He’d never thought about it before, but the sweet burr of sleep in his boss’ voice coupled with the quiet ‘shf’ of shifting cotton sheets made him wonder. He cast a look at Elena, who seemed to have figured out what was going on and was opening the letter.

“I- sorry, am I-“

“It’s fine,” Tseng said, and if he strained Reno could hear the faint creak of wooden floors. He imagined Tseng standing barefoot in the morning chill, hair loose, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “What is it?”

“The letter came,” Reno said, and saying it made him feel dizzy like touching that familiar coarse paper hadn’t. It made it real.

“What does it say?”

“Good question. ‘Lena, what does it say?”

“Uh,” Elena said, unfolding a sheaf of more brown paper. She started to flip through the pages and Reno caught a glimpse of page after page of cramped handwriting. “I’ll… get back to you on that.”

“Elena’s there?” Tseng didn’t sound surprised, but he also didn’t ask frivolous questions.

“Yeah,” Reno said, and realized his teeth were chattering.

“Come here,” Tseng rumbled. Reno heard a door creaking open over the phone. “We can all go over it together and see what we can find out from it.”

“Okay,” said Reno, fighting to keep the chatter in his jaw from creeping into that one word. “Okay.” He scrubbed at his face. “Tseng, man, it’s four am.”

“I know.” The man on the other end of the phone sounded wry, fond, and very, very tired. “Come here.”

 

 

 

They moved quickly. Elena was motivated to tidy up fast by the prospect of seeing Tseng before he’d changed out of his pajamas. Reno read the letter while she did her thing in his cracked bathroom mirror.

 

 

 

As they left, he kicked the third floor apartment door open again. Nobody came to yell at him. He wished they had.


	5. Jazz, Booze, and a Fuck-Up

At night, in a bar, a local jazz band sassing them all with brass and strings and more, Tseng found himself laughing at a drunken joke from Elena over a Junon softshell lobster while Reno and Rude bickered about the state of local Midgar microbrews.

Elena turned her attention to trying to get another drink out of their elusive waiter. Tseng watched her fondly, eyes sliding over occasionally to Reno and Rude. They had their heads pressed together like brothers as they compared, very seriously, some kind of beer app they had on both their phones. Reno’s lips were pursed slightly. Rude, saying nothing, was pointing between the two screens. It was emphatic.

Tseng could feel the reverberation of the double bass in his breastbone.

He had made a mistake, holding his Turks at an arm’s length, and now he was about to go into a personally and politically explosive stronghold with a man he suddenly realized he knew very little about. The ramifications of that hadn’t struck him until he heard Reno on the phone, this morning, a lifetime ago, had heard the crackle of his voice in a weak shadow of his normal boldness, a crunching snap of ice giving under judiciously applied weight.

Would this Reno with a broken-down apartment and a broken-down past be able to kill any threats in silence and secrecy? He didn’t doubt it. Of course not. But would there be a flutter of doubt in him, if, say, his mother came at him with a weapon? If their cover was blown, would he be able to shoot people he had grown up with?

“There’s Marcy,” Elena said, jabbing her little elbow in the soft spot on his side he’d shown her two days ago in training, “She’s a total whore, and an idiot too. She just got divorced, looks like she’s on the prowl.” Tseng, trying to recover from a drunk socialite spy’s too-effective elbow stab, said nothing and sucked tremulously on his drink, blinking away the water collecting in one eye. Doubt, he supposed, was his own worst enemy. Back-stabbing came naturally to Elena, but not Reno. He had never really held any allegiance with these people, though, had he?

“The fuck makes somebody a whore by your standards, ‘Lena?!” Demanded Reno, knocking his knees against Tseng’s legs rowdily before he realized they were the wrong pair.

“Rumor has it she fucked two other guys the day after her wedding,” Elena retorted, watching the chestnut-brunette crossing the floor towards them. She was beautiful, Tseng mused, watching the opulent, heavy swing of her bared breasts in a dress entirely too small to be anything but designer.

“Nice,” Rude said, chuckling. His face didn’t move. Reno bared his teeth in a similarly amused gesture.

“Hi Elena,” Marcy said, pausing at the edge of their table. Elena wiggled in her spot, forcing Tseng to slide in and against Reno. Reno jiggled his leg against Tseng’s, teeth still bared in a feral smile. Tseng flicked a look to him, something he hoped would quell the slow bloom of mischief on Reno’s face. Rude sighed and spread his arms broadly across the top of the booth, muscles sliding visibly under his white shirtsleeves. One hand came to rest behind Tseng’s neck.

“Hey Marcy! Come on and sit down. Have you met my coworkers?” Marcy sat down in that particular way of a woman who felt that the weight of her presence was at her bosom, an elegant slide of hands down the skirt followed by an unfurling of legs that somehow, miraculously, led to her depositing herself snuggled close to Elena. Her breasts pushed against Elena’s arm; her hair draped on Elena’s shoulder.

“I hadn’t seen you in ages,” Marcy said, “Introduce me.” She had the same High-Midgar accent Elena did, a mincing and exact way of handling words that felt analogous to a jeweler inspecting raw stones for worth.

“Marcy, let me introduce you to my colleagues, Reno and Rude,” Elena said. The formal, yet natural way it all came out was offset by the glaring omission of their last names. Marcy, dark blue eyes glittering in the low light of the club, flicked her gaze to Elena but said nothing. She nodded politely, smiling faintly. “Tseng, this is Marcy. We went to school together.” Tseng nodded, acutely aware of the press of Reno against him, the touch of Rude’s fingertips (and what was _that_ , really) at the nape of his neck.

“It’s so nice to meet you all,” Marcy said, leaning on Elena a little more and putting her arms around Elena’s forearm. Tseng would have bet money she was interlacing her fingers with Elena’s under the table. “I hope our Elena hasn’t been causing any trouble.” Elena was remarkably poised about the whole thing, which led Tseng to have a very abrupt, very dramatic restructuring of his understanding of one of his Turks for the second time in a month.

It was not a good month to be him.

“Plenty,” Reno retorted. Trust Reno to be unmoved by a woman who looked like she had stepped out of a painting in the Midgar Metropolitan Fine Arts Salon.

“Oh,” Marcy said, one hand flying up to cover her painted red mouth. “Oh Elena, you bad _girl!_ ” She gave her a playful swat. Tseng didn’t miss the slow slide of her fingers on Elena’s forearm, mostly because it was the sort of movement he imagined trying on Reno on slow afternoons. In his daydreams, it culminated in breaking his desk. Now, here, it seemed to be motivating Elena to nudge Marcy out of the booth.

“That’s me,” Elena said, giving her a glamorous, flashing smile that was the socialite equivalent of the side-eye. “Always trouble, ever since way back when.” Marcy gave a laugh and a hard little shimmy that lodged Elena’s arm even more firmly against her breasts. From the angle he was at, Tseng could see Rude’s eyes tracing that perfect valley with a level of attention he usually devoted to defusing live munitions.

Reno leaned over as the music swelled for the final burst in the piece. His breath was warm in Tseng’s ear as he murmured: “Are they gonna fuck, or am I really missing something?” Tseng, sitting with Reno breathing on him, Elena pressed against him, and Rude still tickling the nape of his neck very faintly, felt that Reno was decidedly not alone in that sentiment.

“Come with me, I wanted to show you off to the girls! We’re all here.”

“Who?” Elena asked, brow furrowing slightly. Now her hand was on Tseng’s leg, higher up than even he felt comfortable with. For the first time in a very, very long time as a Turk, he felt completely and totally underwater.

“Why, come and find out!” Elena gave his thigh a squeeze, then a pat, and then she was vanishing in a demure click of heels that quickly muted into nothingness under the rising music.

“Huh,” said Rude.

“I _bet_ she wants to show Elena off to the girls,” Reno snickered, and Tseng was about to rebuke him but then he saw Marcy jerk Elena off to the side, towards the private rooms at the back of the house. He contemplated going after her, but Elena hadn’t looked particularly worried, just annoyed.

“I don’t think I’d mind meeting them.” Reno gave Rude a slanty, ermine look.

“I don’t think you’re their type, bud.”

“Well…”

Tseng slithered over to give everybody leg room again, wordlessly.

“Gotta piss,” Rude announced, and, finally reclaiming his arms, vanished. How a man of his size and build could slide away like a snake in high grass had always mystified Tseng, if he was to be honest with himself. The phantom tickle of his fingertips at his neck stuck with him.

They drank in silence for a bit. Rude came back and they chatted about this and that, the easy patter of camaraderie serving to settle Tseng’s mood a bit. By the time Elena came back, her hair mussed and her lips pink despite her having started the evening wearing red lipstick, Reno and Tseng and Rude had caught up to her in drinks.

“The fuck was that,” Rude asked, tipping down his glasses to look at Elena.

“Pink’s cute on you, good look,” Reno said, and cackled like a bird at the dump that had just found an uneaten cheeseburger.

“Goddddd,” Elena said, and it was her turn to slouch and spread herself out in the booth, like a snake settling in the sun. “Marcy is such a whore.”

“Mm,” Tseng agreed, eyeballing Marcy as she crossed the room. She was leaving the place with a contented swagger to her hips. Her neckline, mysteriously, had somehow gone back up to her collarbone.

“Whores are the _best_ ,” Elena full-throatedly purred, turning her head up and then over her shoulder, finishing the movement with a toothy beam at Reno and Rude.

“The best at giving head, for sure!” Reno laughed, thumping the table with his fist. Even Rude snorted into his beer. The music had started up again, a lively swing set that had people around them coming and going in waves, dancing and then retiring to their tables again, as regular as breathing. In, out, in out.

“Did she want anything else?” He couldn’t help but feel as if there had been more to it than just Elena having sexy…. Sexy women adventures. It all seemed rather visible for her tastes.

“I guess she’d been thinking about my Thundr profile,” Elena cooed, then finally saw their waiter and almost physically _lunged_ for him. The poor man took her order as if he was confronting a sparking coerl, clutching his tray in front of him like he was hoping it would prevent her from tearing his guts out in one reach.

“What’s up with the waiter?” Reno looked after the fleeing man with genuine befuddlement. Elena took a sip of his drink.

“Thundr again.” Rude broke in before Elena could even swallow her stolen cocktail. Tseng eyed him; he was chatty tonight.

“It’s not like I terrorize nubile young men, god,” Elena said, recovering from her languid sprawl to sit up again. She had lifted a cherry from Reno’s drink, and now was turning it about in her mouth. The flash of red was making the occasional appearance in between her white teeth as she toyed with it; pressed against the shade of pink that didn’t quite match her, the red of the cherry was like nails trailed along the spine, an electric shudder, a silent flare shot against the sunset.

Tseng thought about trying to reclaim his personal space in the booth, then just gave up, for multiple reasons: small women always seemed to be best at occupying the biggest spot; Elena was peak Elena tonight; also: like this, Reno’s thigh occasionally rubbed against his own.

“You sure about that? Weren’t you with some guy the other day when I called?”

“Oh, him. Whatever. He wasn’t nubile, he doesn’t count.”

Tseng couldn’t decide if he’d had too much to drink, or not enough.

 

 

 

“… So that’s how you farm beets,” Reno finished, with a hard poke of his finger to the table. Rude and Tseng had switched to water; Elena and Reno had switched to harder drinks, then shots. Still, Reno was correct: that was how you farmed beets. (Tseng had looked it up, dubiously, his eyes watering again from yet another elbow strike.)

“Wait bu…. But no, how do they even grow?” Elena wasn’t quite sloppy, but she’d undone her white work blouse and her suspiciously-seasonal silk camisole was glimmering in the low light. The bands had switched around midnight, and now moody saxophone was serenading a treatise on old-fashioned farming delivered by a fluorescent Turk. Rude had gone off with the bass player of the previous band. He’d started out offering to help her carry her instrument. She had turned him down and picked up the case with one arm, slinging the strap carelessly over her muscled shoulder but directing him to hold the doors for her with a charitable tone. Rude had a type, that was for sure. Tseng felt grateful that Rude, at least, seemed the same person he’d always known.

“They have to…. Be on the edge of the city? And then we uh…. They compost.”

“Gross,” Elena said, to Reno’s obvious ire. “Isn’t that like, poop?” Then she giggled.

“Compost is a bunch of stuff,” Reno said, defensively, but he gave up on the topic and resignedly took a sip from Tseng’s water. Tseng looked at him, surprised. “Oh uh, sorry.” He pushed the water towards Tseng.

“It’s fine. Do you want me to get you a glass of your own?” Reno shot him that ermine-eyed look from earlier in the night again. Tseng immediately felt alarmed, and aroused, and acutely aware of Elena on his other side. Elena, with her incredibly painful elbows.

“Nah. I should probably head off.”

“Aren’t you two going off on your big mission tomorrow?” Elena had coaxed the terrified waiter to bring her an entire jar of maraschino cherries. She was now lancing them with a swizzle stick, one by one, and eating them slowly, catching the mahogany-purple juice before it could touch her fingers. Reno shrugged and started explaining the timeline again to her, punctuating it now and then with a drunken entreaty to read her e-mail now and then.

Tseng was used to thinking of Elena as a young subordinate, a junior Turk. Occasionally he saw her in what he had assumed was her native element, a woman walking carefully between the spearing threads of the high society she’d been born into, a culture she seemed to loathe and love in equal parts. Tonight, though, he had seen something different. She was a young woman who inspired passions, who had a reputation that repelled and drew, who had tastes and desires she had no hesitation in indulging. This was an Elena Reno knew, and knew well.

He had always found Elena and Reno’s combative friendship odd, decidedly not what he expected from either of them. He had assumed Reno would have some contempt for her, had assumed Elena would have some spite for him. He had seen that in the office, in fencing jabs about idiot socialite laziness and snipes about worthless dirty street children. Perhaps it wasn’t that they didn’t hold antagonistic feelings for each other. Perhaps it was simply that something else rode under those feelings, rendering them mere surface distortions of another, more important, undercurrent.

(Tseng thought about Reno showing up on his doorstep last week at dawn, eyes smeary with sleep and stress, Elena on his elbow. Her fingers had been pinching on his wrist, her tone scolding as she unfurled the thick bundle of papers. Later, in the kitchen, she had smoothed his bangs and Reno had leaned into it and Tseng had been seized with such an intense burst of jealousy that he thought he was going to immolate.

He thought about the feeling of Reno’s ribs shuddering and giving under his fists, the crushing, breaking anger he’d felt at this arrogant piece of trash walking up to him two months after his mother died in the riots his waste-of-flesh gang had started. The way he looked at Tseng, flat on the mat, eyes scared and bright with unshed tears, looking like a dog on its back begging for mercy, before he got back up and came for more. The way his ribs had felt under his hands, skinny and too-thin, as he hoisted Reno’s unconscious body up and dragged him to medical. The way his eyes hadn’t met Tseng’s the next time he’d woken up, the way he’d trembled as they went to spar the next time even despite Tseng’s still-bandaged hand, the way Reno trembled like a man shuddering in the dying throes of a life of cold.)

“-seng!” Tseng startled, blinking and flicking his gaze to Elena and Reno. Elena gave him a slashing, sympathetic smile. It felt mean. He supposed he deserved it.

“All right, well. I’m out. You guys have fun tomorrow with your _hangovers_ on a _mission_.”

“Fuck you, ‘Lena.”

“Sorry, I’m all fucked out for today.”

“You make a video for me?”

“Your poor ass couldn’t afford to watch the trailer, Reno. It’s independent film-festival quality shit, invite only.” Elena kissed the air at them and stood up like she hadn’t just spent the past several hours personally attempting to cause a world Icicle Inn vodka shortage.

“It’s today,” Reno said, his tone sober as Elena’s stride.

“Huh?” Elena blinked, in the process of taking the check and fishing out her card. Tseng felt a momentary, instinctive urge to snatch the check from her and start arguing that he should pay. Images of family events where deciding who would pay took half as long as the meal flashed through his mind. He tamped the urge down and watched Elena pick through her credit cards casually, like a child flicking through trading cards.

“Elena,” he said, reaching out in what he hoped was a dignified and polite fashion for the check. Elena jerked the checkbook away viciously. Tseng thought his aunts would have approved. He just hoped he didn’t get elbowed again.

“Oh hell no, my dad pissed me off _so bad_ last night. He’s getting this.” Elena whipped out a card that looked like it had a materia chip in each corner, slapped it down onto the table hard enough that he heard it clink, and stared laser beams at the waiter. He was having a rough night. Tseng hoped Elena was a good tipper.

Once the offending credit card was sailing away through the night, Elena turned her attention back to Reno.

“What were you saying?”

“Nothing,” Reno said, and drained Tseng’s glass of water.

“Okay,” Elena said, and that was the end of it.

 

 

 

She went up-plate, because of course she did above-plate on Sector 2. Reno and Tseng walked her to the train station. Reno waved her away with the enthusiasm of a Gongangan mother seeing her son off to SOLDIER. Elena gave him the finger. She slid away into the night like that, highlighted in subway neon, vanishing into the distance like a golden angel of vindictiveness.

“What was up with the beets?” Tseng found himself asking as they walked down-plate.

“Oh, yeah.” Reno slouched into himself. It was late enough, or early enough, that they were the only ones out. “I was looking it up. Realized I didn’t….”

Silence fell. Tseng tried to channel Rude. All he could think about was the hot double-bass player he’d gone home with, the flex of her muscles as she’d lifted her case and looked Rude over. Then he was thinking about Elena and Marcy again, and then he was moving to Reno’s leg against his, all night, all right. All right. He was done. He’d forgotten how hot he got when he had had entirely too much to drink. He did it so infrequently.

Fuck.

“I don’t know a lot about it. I guess. I just… I don’t know a lot. In general.” Reno slid his eyes up to Tseng’s face, hands jammed in his pockets and body slouched down. He looked like he was walking into a strong wind. It was a hot night, and Tseng really wanted to strip down.

Strip down and pin Reno to the-

All right.

“You fixed the air conditioner,” Tseng said, instead of, ‘come to my house and let me peel you apart like I’ve been waiting to do it for years.’

“Yeah, and I fried myself in the process.”

“We got you patched up again.”

“Yeah, and _then_ I…“ Like magic, Reno fell silent. To Tseng’s immensely conflicted relief, his obvious distress served as a badly-needed cold shower. “I’m gonna be so fucking tired tomorrow.”

“I don’t think we need to be there at dawn, precisely, do we?” A balled-up sales flyer drifted by their ankles in the hot evening air. Tseng thought longingly of his air-conditioned bedroom.

“Naw,” Reno said, and paused at an intersection that was so impossible to cross during daytime traffic that it had four pedestrian bridges slated to be built. “Tseng.”

Tseng came closer to him, sticky from the humidty and dry-mouthed from all the alcohol. They were in the dark intersection of an alleyway and a dead streetlight. Midgar started to get broken-down here and there once you hit Sector Three, even above-plate. Reno blinked slowly in the darkness, looking up and down the roads. A military truck went by, headed to the freeway from Shinra main. Tseng watched it go, tracked the taillights in the night until they turned and vanished. He wondered if the mission was that urgent, or if Heidegger was just being an asshole again.

“Do you really think my apartment is so shitty?”

The question wasn’t exactly what he’d been expecting.

“Well…..” Tseng mimicked Reno’s posture, jamming his hands in his pocket. “The place is…”

Reno was looking at him, eyes church-glass-bright. He was looking at him, sweating even in the middle of the night from the city’s summer heat, breath hazy with booze. He was looking at him and Tseng was looking back and it wasn’t romantic, wasn’t even particularly sexy. But, standing there in the darkness, two murderers standing there in the black of a mysterious, unknowing city glowering with unholy light, Tseng felt a certain level of settled that he hadn’t in quite a while. Reno was looking at him with trust, really, wasn’t he? He loved Elena and Elena loved him, and Rude and he were brothers and loved each other, and maybe he loved Tseng too. Maybe he did, and maybe Tseng had been making this all too complicated, like he always did.

“It has a charm,” Tseng assented. “I like it.” Reno smiled at him. It was a sweet smile. It made Tseng want to take his face in his hands and just nuzzle him. “But I could see you somewhere even more charming.”

“Oooh, Tseng,” Reno laughed, and swung around to walk at his side easily. They weren’t touching, but they were close enough to if either wanted. “Like where?”

“Like my bed,” Tseng said, unthinkingly, buzzed, happy, flush with his revelation about his Turks.

He felt the blood drain from his face as he processed that he’d said that.

Aloud.

“Oh,” said Reno, and abruptly stopped walking.


	6. Lunch, a Lay, and an Engagement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sat on this for a while because I was uncertain of Tseng's focus on and pursuit of his desires in this chapter, and then I remembered that the starting Midgar arc in the game can be alternately summarized as, "Tseng put the entire main plot of the game on hold for literal years because he thought Aerith was cute."
> 
> #Tsengplz
> 
> Also, time to sing for my supper- we earn our rating in this chapter, kids.

* * *

 

 

If Tseng had his way in life, here is how things would have gone:

Reno would falter, and he would save the moment, suave like he was when he wasn’t being Tseng, suave like a man that knew what the hell he was doing in his personal life. And then, in the heat, they would embrace, gingerly, and Reno would make a needy noise against him with all that booze buzzing through them both. They would stumble back to Reno’s place, with its immaculate ceilings and swampy air, and Tseng would lay Reno out like a gift, like a present, like a peace offering. He would tear into him like a kid rips into a package, leave Reno dazed and begging and gasping, and seeing stars, and inside him the earth would move and birds would sing and plants would bloom, and all those other clichés Tseng’s temporary lovers spouted off after he was finished with them but before he was done with them.

Then he’d start all over with Reno again, and again, leaving him sore and whining and begging for it still, as the sun came up. He’d leave bites in places he knew Reno would feel when he moved the next day, and finally Reno would sit up as the sun slid through the dusted windows of his apartment and groan, and shudder, and stretch, because of Tseng. He would look over his shoulder at Tseng, watching him as he lay prone on the bed, and Reno would roll his shoulders like he did when he got a particularly satisfying workout in at the gym in the Tower.

He’d say something like, ‘I can still feel you on me,’ and he’d stand up and shake himself a little and walk away. He’d be limping and he’d like it, though he’d complain loudly about it as he went. His voice would be rough and scratched from all the screaming he did that night. Tseng would watch him go. There’d be a little smear of Tseng’s cum on his inner thigh, and the sight of it would make Tseng want to pin Reno to the wall and make him feel him on him all over again. He’d consider actually doing it very, very seriously.

Here’s what happened instead, because of all of his Turks, against all reason, _he_ seemed to be the one who was least capable of handling his business like an adult:

Reno blinked, and shuffled his feet, and laughed what Tseng had said away like any other drunken joke with an ease that belied experience. Tseng did not have the courage to change the current of the conversation, or try to. He felt like dying, actually. Reno and he talked about nothing important, and walked down the street until they hit where Reno would turn east and he would go west. They parted cordially-

“See you at eleven,” Reno called, and Tseng agreed with a grunt, feeling hung over already.

And then he went into the pre-dawn light, shuffling away with his hands in his pockets. Tseng did watch him walk away, but given that he was fully clothed, in public, and not covered in dozens of signs of Tseng’s carnal possession of him, it felt like a hollow victory to say the least.

“Fuckkkk,” said Tseng once he was a block away, and dragged his hands over the air in front of his face in agonized, clawing motions, terrifying a dirty bum who was half-in and half-out of a trash can. “Fuck!”

 

 

 

The weather turned as he walked home, so by the time he stepped into his entryway, he was soaked through. He listened as he shut the front door, but the blare of Midgar Seven was missing from the building’s soundscape. His father wasn’t awake yet, or if he was, he didn’t want to hear the sound of anybody’s voice, even his favorite weather woman Mallory Mackson in her hot yellow sun dresses. The chill of the air conditioning felt good, even against the wet cling of his suit jacket.

So he stood there in the dark of the landing, looking up the stairs to his own door, painted matte blue, then looking across the generous entry hall to the gleaming red of his father’s door. He dripped morosely on the ceramic tile floor, peeling off his jacket and hanging it up where his father could take it and send it off with the rest of the dry cleaning. He started to wring out his ponytail, then got frustrated and took his hair down to deal with it that way. The air conditioning moved from comfortable to cold, and he started to shiver a little.

It wasn’t, precisely, a rejection. It also was in no way an acceptance of his affections. Reno didn’t take casual fucks. Well, he didn’t take casual fucks that Elena, Rude, or he knew about, which basically meant he didn’t take them at all. No casual fucks and no long-term partners, and no dates and no anythings. He sort of wondered if Reno had even really registered what he’d said-

Reno’s face, sliding into open, vulnerable surprise, his eyes big and his lashes fluttering, tongue flashing out to wet his lower lip

-of course he’d gotten it. He would be lying to himself, badly, if he tried to pretend otherwise. Here he was trying to be a better Turk and he was going to start lying to himself about his own Turks?

Reno, despite his lightning-quick responses on assignment, did prefer to chew things over when he could. He’d spent two months deciding what weapon to choose for permanent assignment, and another month of testing deciding what element of current to run through the thing. The idea of having to wait a month or two for Reno to decide what to do with what Tseng had laid on the table made him want to drip harder, though.

Tseng wondered if there was a status effect for feeling like you’d been rained on inside and out.

The creak of the side door alerted him to his father’s presence. He shuffled in carrying a basket brimming with suspiciously leafy things, turning to shut the door behind him before he put it down and looked his son over.

John Ying was silvered at the temples but still handsome, and though he was growing somewhat fragile with age, he still had a sense about him, as if he was flesh wrapped around a rod of purest iron. Tseng had always admired that about his father. He was the emotional one, moved to joy by the smallest thing, and would frequently drag his wife and young son to any exhibit, scientific or artistic, that excited his interest. But there was a strength that never waned, a self-possession that never faltered. He would pace when he became excited, hands clasped in front of him, before racing off to his typewriter to get out whatever burning idea was igniting him in the moment.

Tseng found the contrast between Hojo and his own father interesting at times. Hojo was a man devoid of the joy that seemed to spur his father, but given to the same areas of passion- science, medicine, health (… ostensibly). Hojo seemed to suffer life because of what it allowed him to do with it; his father seemed to relish life because of what it allowed him to know of it. Hojo had asked him to send his regards to his father, on occasion, for various interesting papers he had published. Tseng dutifully did so, but his father had no interest in accolades from his own son’s mouth, even if they were sent from another, a leader in their shared field. When he was younger he had found it frustrating. He still did sometimes.

“You’re all wet,” his father chided, putting down his basket with a soft huff that wasn’t quite a groan. “You’re going to get sick right before you go on your business trip. When do you leave today? When is your plane?”

“I have to leave around ten,” Tseng replied, then took his father’s hands in his and turned them palm-up. “You’re one to talk. You’re wet too, and all muddy under the nails.”

“I have to mind the plants,” his father replied firmly. “We spent all that money putting the beds in. I have to get something good out of it!” Tseng peered over his father’s shoulder and eyeballed the abundance of greenery with skepticism that was entirely for show.

While it was true that only Aerith could get abundant greenery from the polluted earth of Midgar, the current trend up-plate was raised bed gardening. Tseng had no problem encouraging that particular trend; it helped to disguise the girl’s presence if the whole upper plate was also busy growing flowers, albeit from dirt imported from hundreds of miles away.

“All that kale,” he sighed, and tied his hair back again. John shook a finger at him and went back to his basket.

“Kale is good for you! You should eat more vegetables. Your old baba makes you mint soup and you don’t even eat it. It’s got plenty of good flavors. You’ve always been so picky.”

“Dad,” Tseng said, sliding into Wutaian. It felt like putting on pre-warmed house slippers, even if his Wutaian was a bit childish, a bit stunted, compared to his father’s sophisticated flare. “You know I hate mint.”

“It grows like a weed, just like you. If I feed you enough maybe you’ll grow another few inches. You’ll have to get all your suits re-tailored.” The two men smiled at each other. Tseng liked his father, both as a parent and as a person. He had always been aware that he was lucky, though working at Shinra had only sharpened that awareness.

“The only way I’ll grow is out,” Tseng shrugged, the shrugged again, twice, because the other things he wanted to say to his father he didn’t know how to say in Wutaian, and didn’t want to go back to Midgar Standard. He tried to figure out how to beg his father for tea without getting a whole breakfast too.

“Can’t impress the pretty ones that way,” John agreed, and in Standard he would have had to specify if he meant women or men, but like this Tseng and he could gently slide by the inevitability of no grandchildren and continue on with comfort, closeness, dodge the hard grasp of unpleasant facts.

“I’d have to pay extra for flights, too,” Tseng said, and started to climb the stairs.

“Clean yourself up, salary boy. I’ll bring you up some breakfast,” his father called up.

“No,” he groaned, and the laughter that echoed up the stairs after him was love and care and relentless iron. Breakfast it was.

 

 

 

“Does your dad know what you do?” Reno was eating the extra lunch that had been packed for Tseng against his protests. His father had even packed his favorite green chopsticks, the ones with the embedded glass circles that looked like materia. Reno was using them. He looked like he hadn’t slept (Tseng had napped), hadn’t eaten (Tseng had of course been fed against his protests), hadn’t even had a change of clothing (need it be said, Tseng had changed). These facts were made especially egregious by the fact that they were meeting in Reno’s apartment.

“No,” Tseng said. He watched with mingled amusement and concern as Reno shoved something that looked dangerously spicy into his mouth in one compact mass. Reno was turning pink from the heat. “He thinks I work in accounting.”

“Hah! Really? That’s what I said we do in the letter.”

“Really,” Tseng said, and cast an eye to the overflowing recycle bin facing Reno’s (unlocked when he came in, now locked) front door. He was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, half in and half out. “Accountants? Both of us?” The heat was more bearable now, partially because of the weather and partially because he had changed into more casual clothing: linen slacks, a light tank top, an airy cardigan. He’d tied his hair up into a full loop instead of a looser ponytail. It was supposed to be a scorching hot day later on, more so even than the past few. He didn’t want the tickle of hair on his neck in the heat.

“Explains why we don’t have anything to say about anything to do with Shinra, man. Accountants don’t know shit. Holy fuck this is so good. Can I call your dad for takeout from now on?”

“It’s just some random thing he made,” Tseng replied, distracted by the image of Reno learning to cook under his father’s watchful eye. It made his mind skitter to this early morning.

“Mmm,” Reno replied, eyes watering from the heat, chopsticks flashing. “Your dad’s so cool. What can’t he do? Wait, you said he sucks at repairing things, right? Maybe I could repair his stuff in return for fucking rad dishes like this shit. You look like a hipster, by the way. You dressed too cool to be an accountant. Put on some shitty glasses or something, man. Argyle. An argyle sweater-vest made out of shitty glasses.”

Tseng could recognize a distraction topic when he heard one, and the swearing was a dead giveaway. “About this morning, Reno…”

“Aw shit dude.” Reno slapped down the chopsticks and picked up his bottle of water (also for Tseng, also for lunch). “It was just drunk talk. It’s cool, man. You don’t need to get all worried. I’m not like, convinced you secretly have some kind of thing for me.” He drank in long gulps, sending his Adam’s Apple bobbing. In the smeared sunlight of his kitchen, it made for a romantic image. He had to give it to Reno- the dramatic lighting in this apartment was superb, like everything was perpetually cast in watercolors. “I’m not gonna’ get all weird about it.” He gasped for air, went back for water again. It was a big bottle. His father was always worried about dehydration. The way Reno was going, it seemed like his father should be more worried about drowning.

Tseng watched the scene in front of him with narrowed eyes, trying to come to a decision. He had a feeling he rarely got, as if he was standing on the edge of the roof of Shinra Tower, drawn forward into danger almost against his will. It felt like… switching languages for his father, actually, now that he thought about it: a choice between a world he was clumsy in, but close, or a world where he stood strong and sophisticated and aloof, aloof, aloof.

He pushed off from the doorway. Reno watched him from the corner of his eye, a flicker of a look at first but a more solid stare as Tseng prowled closer. He was still drinking, head tipped back, but slowed his pace and finally put the water down to look up at Tseng when he was practically on top of him.

Easy to forget, Tseng thought again as he loomed over him, how small he was. An outsize personality. Burning presence. Loud. Force of nature.

He put a hand on the back of Reno’s chair and another on the table next to them, aware of the other man’s wide-eyed stare. Reno was boxed in, and purely to emphasize it, Tseng pressed his leg against Reno’s just like he had done to Tseng the other night.

Secretive. Alone. Turk. Reno’s leg against his. Rude’s hand at the back of his neck. Elena grabbing his thigh.

 _His_ Turk.

“After this, get dressed,” Tseng said, leaning down. Reno’s head tilted a little to the side as if he was uncertain, but he only had so far to go because Tseng’s mouth was suddenly at his ear. “I’ll tell you what to wear.”

“Uh,” said Reno, just like last night. Tseng screwed up his courage, stomach coiled still like he was about to find out if a mission had just gone pear-shaped or not, and went for the kill. He drew his tongue over the edge of Reno’s ear, slow, slow, slow, then leaned back to look at him, hands still braced, more for his own support than anything.

Reno’s eyes were huge, green swallowed by enormous pools of black. He looked like a cat about to bolt, or pounce. His face was- stunned, really, lips parted slightly and his head still tilted slightly to the side. He was holding still like a prey animal, but his chest was rising too steadily to be anything but the tightly-controlled killer instinct of a Turk as he thought through, discarded, reselected courses of action.

Tseng looked down, then back up at Reno’s face. He felt almost dizzy with relief, though he knew it could just be physicality, the intensity of proximity, even a fear response (and that brought him back down to earth)-

“Okay,” shuddered Reno, blinking rapidly. His voice was soft. “I- I can do that. For. For you.”

“Brush your teeth first,” Tseng ordered, sounding much, much more confident than he felt he had any right to be. _For you_. The heat those words had fired up in him was incredible. It was burning. It felt like he had hot coals in his belly and he was breathing fire and Reno was drinking it all down like he was a dying star.

“Okay.” They held their poses in silence for a moment. “…. Tseng, uh.”

“Yes?” He quirked an eyebrow, still relishing the sight of Reno in his stupid shiny basketball shorts, gazing up at him dazedly. Tseng was standing in the fridge river and he didn’t even care.

“I need you to move so I can stand up.”

“Of course.” Tseng watched him a moment longer, appreciating the way Reno squirmed a little under his gaze, before he finally did move. Reno bolted for the bathroom at a pace a hair shy of a run.

Well. That had been easier than expected.

 

 

 

Reno ended up taking a shower. Tseng wasn’t sure how to take that, and he ended up pacing silently in front of Reno’s couch as he waited.

Every time he reached the conclusion that he had misread things, that he had completely fucked their working relationship and their mission, let alone any hope for a personal relationship, his mind darted back to that soft, _for you_ , and he was standing still and staring at the shut door of Reno’s bedroom again.

He stripped off his cardigan (Reno was right, he did look like some kind of trendy hipster) and threw it on the couch. He paced some more. He peeled off his tank top too. He put it back on. The water was still running.

By the time the water shut off, Tseng was slouched on the couch, feeling exhausted again. Reno appeared wearing a towel slung on his hips, hair fluffy but still wet.

“How often do you have to re-dye your hair?” Tseng asked, suddenly curious.

“It’s natural,” Reno replied, looking a little amused in the way of somebody who would normally be irritated by the question but was, just this once, feeling generous.

“I see,” Tseng replied, feeling like he’d put his foot in his mouth. Also: doubtful.

“You’ll see for yourself if you wait long enough,” Reno said brightly, and then faltered.

“I _see,_ ” said Tseng again, and he couldn’t stop himself from smiling now. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and lacing his fingers together rested his chin on his hands.

“Oh boy. I’m. Man.” Reno clutched at his towel, dripping slowly, not moving further into the living room though his weight shifted like he was about to change that at any second. “Man, boss, I mean, Tseng, I’m just- I’m really fucking….”

He trailed off and Tseng stood up, eyes narrowed. He didn’t say anything. He put his hands in his pockets. He’d said his piece, and Reno had largely remained silent. He knew, now, that Reno had difficulty expressing certain things, things closer to the core of his being than Reno liked. Tseng could wait.

“You’re gonna’ laugh at what I have in my closet, man.” Tseng wanted to accept that as what Reno was nervous about, but at the last moment he pulled back, inspected the situation, decided it was a smokescreen. It was the curtain again, and Reno was holding on to the rope tightly, working hard to keep that barrier up. “…. No?”

Tseng shook his head wordlessly. He had a sudden flash of insight: this was why Reno and Rude got along so well, how and why Rude had gotten so close to Reno so fast. Silence as an interrogation technique was, after all, vastly underutilized.

“… I uh. Fuck.” Reno’s elbows turned pink when he blushed. His whole body did. “I don’t really…. Hook up. Much.”

“I know. I’m not in a rush.”

To his immense surprise, Reno’s eyes brimmed with sudden wetness. Reno seemed shocked by it as well, because he whipped away, lifting a hand to scrub at his face with the backs of his knuckles viciously.

“ _Dude_.”

“I’m not.” Tseng decided to approach, which turned out all right because Reno pivoted and ended up tucking himself against his chest almost by accident, chin going down so all he could see was a slowly drying mop of fluorescent red. The wetness from his hair bled into Tseng’s tank top, which he didn’t actually mind. If there were other sources of wetness on his shirt, he wasn’t about to point it out.

“What the fuck is wrong with me!” Reno’s hand rose to cover his eyes, his other hand clenching tight at his towel. Tseng considered saying nothing, discarded that. Considered saying multiple things, discarded those as well. It was hot, but he didn’t mind Reno’s damp body radiating heat. Couldn’t say that either- not yet, anyway.

“Perhaps,” Tseng said, horrified by the joke he was making even though he had selected it as the best option, and Planet save him but what the _hell_ was his life, “tears _do_ get me hard.” He brought his arms up to rest on Reno’s waist, over his towel, fingers only barely brushing his flank.

Reno froze, then peeled himself away from Tseng’s chest to look up at him incredulously, his shielding hand held up next to his eyes like a beckoning cat’s. Tseng stared back down at him, poker-faced.

“That,” Reno said, eyes red and expression raw and open, “that’s so fucking gross, Tseng.”

“You asked,” Tseng said, feeling mortified but also slightly hysterical. He had the sinking feeling that that was the funniest joke he had ever made in his life.

“Holy shit,” Reno laughed, a half-grin cracking across his face. Tseng smiled back.

“Bedroom,” he ordered. The tension in the room was gone, so Reno’s grumbling strut to the door wasn’t particularly sexy. Even so, Tseng found himself just as relieved as Reno looked.

 

 

 

The bedroom was, unsurprisingly, extremely clean. Perhaps too clean.

“Do you actually sleep in here?” Tseng asked, perching on the bed and watching Reno shut the door behind them. The room was devoid of any of the personal touches of the rest of the apartment. It was as if Reno had gone through the checklist of “Things In a Bedroom” and, once finished, had ended the project like a Shinra urban development campaign: never to be touched again.

“Uh…. Actually, I do usually just fall asleep on the couch.” Reno opened up the closet door, which gave a loud squeak of old hinges, and gestured at his clothes. In typical Reno fashion, the closet gave the impression of disorder, but a closer look revealed a tightly-held internal logic.

“Come here.” He did, nerves starting to creep in to his posture again. Tseng looked him over, up and down, then up again slowly. “You took a shower?”

“I mean, yeah, it’s hot. I’m an active guy.”

Tseng gave him a narrow-eyed smile. “Really.”

“Also I figured you might touch my dick.”

“More honest.”

“You need to shower?”

“I showered before I came over.” Reno let Tseng pry his hand away from his towel, let it drop. He looked him over mildly, noting with interest that unless Reno was _too_ thorough, yes, he was indeed a natural fire-red. The man in question started to squirm, so Tseng took his bony hips in his hands and drew him forward so that Reno was straddling his legs. He was still standing, not quite fighting Tseng’s hands but also not following along meekly. Tseng took a deep, steadying breath.

“You can’t just stare at a dude like that without saying anything, man.”

“I don’t think I need to.” Tseng applied a little more pressure, which Reno still resisted, then shifted his grip and pulled him down with his hands on his ass. Reno fell forward, landing on Tseng with a soft cuss, struggling up to get his balance. Tseng pulled him down again. Reno stilled, shifted, stilled again, then stared squirming for real, his belly tense and his dick starting to wake up after what must have been one hell of a cold shower.

“I uh, I can feel your dick.”

“Rather the point,” Tseng replied calmly, massaging Reno’s lower back in small circles with his thumbs. “I hope you didn’t get yourself off in the shower.”

“Nope,” said Reno simply, curving into Tseng’s thumbs. His eyes sharpened for a moment. “We have to be at the commune by late-afternoon at latest.”

“Don’t worry,” Tseng said. “I think we’ll be well on our way by then. But for now…”

“Are we gonna fuck or what?” Asked Reno, still squirming against the hard outline of Tseng’s dick against his ass where Tseng was pinning him down. Of course, they were both Turks, and while Tseng was physically stronger than Reno, Reno consistently outranked him in close evasion and breaking holds. Tseng knew that if Reno wasn’t feeling it, he’d be making some distance between them. No, Reno was allowing this, and the thought made Tseng wish they didn’t have this insane mission looming above their heads like an axe.

Tseng snorted softly in response to the question. “Depends on what you mean by that.” Reno licked his lips, eyes fixed on Tseng’s. “If you mean, am I going to,” his hands curved down, tucking into the intimate space between Reno’s legs, lifting him, fingers splaying to spread his legs a little and brush his balls, “take you here, no chance. Too much preparation time.”

“Oh uh, huh,” Reno replied, hands finally flying to Tseng’s shoulders for balance. His dick was flushed and perked up now, his thighs tense with the new position. He looked panicked, but the right kind. “I’m, fuck man, I’m a little. Out of my depth right now.”

“I’ve got you,” Tseng assured him. Then: “Tell me if you want to stop. We still do need to prepare for the actual mission.” Reno visibly considered, head turning to the door.

“… Can we set an alarm on one of our phones or something?” Tseng looked at Reno for a long moment: poised precariously on his lap with his dick skyward and his pulse headed there too. He wanted to set a timer in case they needed to stop and get ready for the mission. Reno, in a nutshell. No wonder he was a Turk.

“My PHS is in my back pocket,” Tseng replied levelly, professional respect warring with his own ego. Professional pride won out: leave it to Reno to plan ahead for unexpected events that could jeopardize the mission, even if the ‘unexpected events’ involved getting off.

Reno gave Tseng an unreadable look, then slid his arms around Tseng, brushing close to pull it out.

“Sorry. I just….” He gestured vaguely, already in Tseng’s phone. Tseng, once again, found himself torn between professional pride and ego—Reno didn’t even bat an eyelash, entering Tseng’s access code with no indication that he thought Tseng didn’t know he knew. To be fair, he knew all his employees’ codes as well, but that was less subterfuge and more being the admin of their departmental PHS management software.

Sometimes Tseng felt like he might not be a very good Turk after all. At least, not in comparison to his current field agents. This was definitely one of those times.

“I feel better now,” Reno told Tseng, putting his PHS on silent and leaning to put it on the nightstand, the one untouched by the millions of water glasses Reno usually had living on his coffee table. “Where were we?”

“Discussing me, in you, fucking you,” Tseng said by way of revenge, dragging Reno back into place on his lap and giving a short thrust up. It felt so good that he hissed and did it again. “And how we can’t right now, but that one of these days I’m going to tie you down and fuck you,” Reno was grinding against him now, arms on his shoulders, hands planted on his back, his dick hardening back up, breathing a little high-pitched, a little shuddery, “and fuck you, and fuck you, so hard that you can’t walk straight,” Reno whined, driving his dick against Tseng’s belly, one hand shifting to curl in his hair and pull, which made Tseng hiss and toss his head, loving it and fighting it for the fun of it, “and then I’m going to,”

“Fuck, Tseng, just- unzip your fly-“ It was a miracle that he could do it one-handed, maintaining his grip on Reno’s ass to get at that perfect cant of friction and weight and pressure, but it felt incredible when he managed to free his own dick from his clothing, “Ohhhh my god,” Reno moaned, pressing his mouth to Tseng’s shoulders and crying out, pulling harder at his hair.

“I’m going to make you sit in my lap, all tied up-“ Tseng continued, jerking them both off between their bodies pressed together, skin electric where Reno was against him, “and I’m going to- fuck-“ Reno was clawing at his back, snarling, teeth catching at his shoulder, hips snapping against his hand brutally, and Reno turning vicious-feral when he came was the hottest thing he’d ever seen.

Tseng let him ride his orgasm out and tried to decide how he wanted to finish, but all he could think of was the burn of Reno’s marks on his skin, “And I’m going to- fuck you again-“ Reno moaned low and throaty, starting to go soft in Tseng’s hand. He slid a hand down to Tseng’s dick and resumed the work Tseng had been doing, pulling Tseng’s hair so his head had to tip back. “-Ah!” His hips rose up again and Reno scrabbled, orgasm-hazy, to keep his balance, hand still working Tseng’s dick roughly, “I’m going to fuck you until you can’t walk at _all_ \- and you just have to-“ Reno exhaled sharply against Tseng’s throat, having risen up to bite him there too, thighs trembling as Tseng drew his hands up Reno’s back, down his sides, up to caress his balls, down to squeeze his ass, “You just have to stay in bed-“ An avalanche of jolting heat overcame him. He grabbed Reno down again by his hips and gave a series of hard thrusts against him, nerves sizzling as he caught Reno’s overstimulated almost-pained ‘uh, uh, uh’, and then his grip went lock-firm and his mind was seared with an intensity he never really had words for.

 

 

 

Tseng tucked Reno against him and lay back, panting. For his part, Reno seemed content to go where he was put, covered in sweat and dazed beyond belief.

They lay like that for a while. Tseng didn’t particularly mind when Reno curled away from him, rolling to get some space. It was starting to heat up, after all.

“Holy…. Shit, Tseng.” Reno curled toward him again, turning to do it, revealing Tseng’s cum beading on his lower belly. Tseng dragged his eyes up to Reno’s face, because he was a grown man and no matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t really go again right now, no matter how much that image played into deeply-rooted personal fantasies. “That was…. I don’t think I’ve ever had a jerk-off like that before.”

Tseng made a pleased noise, closing his eyes. His hand stretched out and found Reno’s upper thigh.

“One of my hidden talents not listed in the files,” he said, feeling boneless. His fingers tickled up and down Reno’s thigh. Reno made a low-pitched grumble that finished in a groan. “Not a compensable skill.”

“Don’t wanna talk about that, gross. What were you saying? About doing me so hard I couldn’t walk?”

Tseng chuckled, turning to face Reno, who had his own eyes shut and was still marinating in his own afterglow.

“It’s a kink. You don’t have to.” He felt Reno’s hand on his shirt, over the lean stretch of his own ribs.

“Kind of hot.”

“Good,” he said, and Reno’s eyes slid open languidly. “I’ll tie you up so you can’t fight me, too.”

“Woah,” said Reno, shivering, but his eyes were heated below his lashes.

“Safety word,” Tseng said, by way of reassurance, then: “And I’ll spread your legs with ties, too, for good measure.”

“I don’t know what any of that means.”

“Open,” Tseng said, pulling at Reno’s thigh slightly by way of instruction, “fixed. But safe.”

Reno puffed a thoughtful sigh, pillowing his head on his arm, eyes drooping shut like he’d been drugged. “M’tired. Glad I set the alarm.”

“Smart,” was Tseng’s final comment before he was out like a light.

 

 

 

Getting ready was pleasant. Tseng did end up taking a shower, of course, and changing his clothes. Reno showered again too, humming so softly that if Tseng hadn’t been standing at the sink, tying his hair up once more, he wouldn’t have heard it.

“Still need to tell me what to wear?” Reno said, the water turning off with a squeak. Tseng, fussing with hairs that were attempting to make a break for it, shook his head and leaned in closer to the glass.

“Why is it so dim in here?”

Reno tossed him a sardonic look in the mirror. “What do I need light for, my makeup?”

“Cheeky,” Tseng warned, trying not to be amused by the idea. Reno shrugged and left the room, whistling all the way to the creak of the closet door.

Standing in the dimness of the bathroom, Tseng tilted his head this way and that, inspecting himself. Reno seemed to have managed to keep his bites below work-collar, but in casual summerwear, he looked like he’d gotten too friendly with baby marlboros. The blooming bruise right on the dip of his throat was going to darken considerably, and the scratches on the slope of his shoulders were almost an advertisement.

Ownership, Tseng contemplated philosophically, did go both ways.

“Come on, the train down there only runs three more times today!”

Reno was waiting for him at the doorway, next to his beer-filled recycling bin. Tseng considered asking him if he wanted to empty it now, but then he realized Rude would probably be watching the place while he was away. Rude’s apartment was in a much, much posher neighborhood up-plate, and resultantly much smaller. Tseng had heard that Rude relished the chance to stretch his legs, metaphorically speaking, even if it meant emptying a backlog of recycling.

Reno was in a loose tank and jean shorts combo that made him look skinnier and weaker than he was. Tseng recognized the clothing from the department closet, wondered briefly, but said nothing. He had ugly star-shaped sunglasses perched on top of his head, a cometweed-themed messenger bag looped over his shoulder, and a loosely-tied pair of yellow work boots on that were so old and damaged that the steel toe of one was exposed.

“Cometweed?”

“Blaze it triple-seven,” Reno said, straight-faced.

“I don’t think accountants smoke,” Tseng sighed, feeling like they made a convincingly odd couple. He was wearing another selection of neutral-slacks-dark-cardigan-light-tank. His duffel bag, also neutral, was slung over his shoulder casually. His only real excuse was that it made packing efficient, and even that only held up under so much scrutiny.

Reno cackled in response, that wild cock-crow that meant he was causing trouble. “Shows what YOU know about accountants! Where the hell do you think I get all my stuff for contacts from?”

“Impossible.” Tseng was aghast.

“Oh hell yeah. The science interns will make you experimental cocktails, but when it comes to special breeds of Ol’ Faithful, get your ass to the numbers people.”

Tseng struggled with this new knowledge, struggled with the fact that this was new knowledge, and finally gave up on the thread and grabbed at the handle of the bag as Reno started to walk away.

“Wh- hey!”

“Come here,” Tseng growled, taking advantage of Reno’s natural instinct to spin and face the fight. He reached up and cupped Reno’s jaw between his two hands, tipping his face up to meet his own, mindful of the hands that had risen to break his hold on instinct. They locked eyes, Reno’s fingers flexing against Tseng’s wrists. Reno looked fierce, angry, like a bird about to scratch his eyes out.

His expression softened into neutrality.

Tseng leaned down the final inch and kissed him, swiping his tongue along Reno’s lower lip before giving a nip that made him startle, fingers jumping on his wrists. Reno made a sound, a question, and Tseng kissed him again and again and again, until Reno opened his mouth for him and Tseng wrapped his arms around his waist, pulling Reno in tight and hard. He felt Reno’s nails against his sides in a light scratch and growled again into the plush heat of his mouth, warning him.

He drew back gradually, aware that Reno was half-hard against him. Well, it was fair. So was he. Tseng held Reno around the waist still, wouldn’t let him go.

“Holy fuck,” Reno breathed, lips a little puffy, body curving into Tseng’s despite himself. “We have to go, Tseng.”

“Let’s say,” Tseng said, eyes fixed on Reno’s face, “that we’re engaged. Makes it easy to get some space for ourselves.”

“For the mission,” Reno said skeptically, “right?”

“Sure,” Tseng said, and slid his fingers down under the waistband of Reno’s shorts to rub at his hipbone. No boxers. Hm. “For the mission.”

“You’re actually gonna do work, right?” Reno’s skepticism hadn’t abated. He was leaning back, hands pressed against Tseng’s belly to get some more distance. “Like, seriously, we might get shot at, this is a real thing. You said they’re stockpiling serious firepower.”

Tseng laughed. Just now, like this, he felt like he was closer to his rookie field days than he had been in a while. “Getting shot makes the survival sex better.”

Reno’s eyebrows drew down. “The hell makes you say that?”

“Experience,” Tseng replied cheerily, and loosened his hold on Reno to swing around to his side. Reno continued to look at him with serious doubt on his face, so Tseng flipped up his shirt to reveal a long sliding dimple in the flesh of his ribs. “Really.”

“Woah,” said Reno, for the second time today, and Tseng got the distinct impression that it had nothing to do with his gunshot wound (Reno had several of his own, had seen this old wound on Tseng many times) and everything to do with the _implication_.

“Congratulations,” Tseng said as they locked the door behind them on the landing of Reno’s shitty apartment building.

“On my engagement?” Reno looked at Tseng from under his brow, head dipped and turned sideways, teeth slightly bared for maximum effect: disdain.

“Of course,” Tseng agreed, and tried not to be surprised when Reno grabbed his fingers with his, loosely intertwining them. He wasn’t looking at Tseng, keeping his green eyes fixed down the stairs. If it weren’t for his own hand telling him so, he might never have known Reno was touching him.

“Thanks. I have a dress picked out and everything.” He contemplated leaning in and kissing Reno’s temple, but decided he’d pushed his boundaries enough today. He got the sense that there was only so much physical contact Reno would allow, regardless of the status of their partnership. Even Rude got jabbed away when he stood too close, and Elena and he constantly fell into bickering fights that spilled into the cafeteria as they broke for lunch.

Indeed, his instinct seemed to have served him well: Reno dropped his fingers from Tseng’s and started down the stairs, making as much noise as humanly possible as he went.

“You want a ring?” Tseng called down, eyeballing each door he passed. He anticipated a neighbor bursting out to scream at him any second.

“Accountants hate shit like that,” Reno said, opening the front door and taking a moment to bask in the sun, even as seamy-orange sticky as it felt. “You gotta think with your wallet.”

“President Shinra did that,” Tseng countered, coming to stand next to Reno as he tried to peer inside the slot of his mailbox one last time. “Look what it got him: a son and a giant canon.”

“At least his son _has_ a giant canon,” Reno shot back, but he sounded amused.

“Add that to the list of things I don’t want to think about.”

“He might!”

“He isn’t even a teenager.”

“Accountants hate teenagers.”

Tseng couldn’t argue with that.


End file.
